The First 90 Days: What Happens After You Hire a Virtual CFO?

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Delegate CFO: Hello, everyone. I’m Steve Hovland, founder of Delegate CFO, virtual CFO website.

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Delegate CFO: Today’s webinar is designed to demystify what happens after you hire a virtual CFO. In particular, the first 90 days of that process. And so I hope you find this very informative.

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Delegate CFO: And hopefully it makes it easier for you to understand what happens after you go ahead and hire that respective firm.

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Delegate CFO: So, let’s go ahead and get started. First item is… to understand.

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Delegate CFO: Once you’ve pulled the trigger, and you have your virtual CFO firm.

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Delegate CFO: You want to really know what’s going to happen now. And, again, this webinar is mainly geared towards our firm, but other firms may be a little different, but we want to go over what’s going to be the process now that you’ve hired us as your firm, so what can you expect?

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Delegate CFO: And one of the big things that we say is, we want to set the expectations, and we want to drive results. They go hand in hand, so that’s very important on this. So, first off, a little bit about the company.

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Delegate CFO: Delegate CFO. I founded that back in 2019. I used to be an audit partner in a 100-person CPA firm, and during my time as an audit partner.

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Delegate CFO: I saw a lot of small and medium businesses that really needed somebody on staff or to help them with cash flow, budgeting, forecasts, etc.

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Delegate CFO: But they really didn’t need to have somebody sitting there full-time.

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Delegate CFO: And at that point in time, a full-time CFO salary averaged about $150,000 a year. So, they really didn’t need somebody sitting there 40 hours a week, you know, going through their respective process. They really needed somebody to help them along the way with, you know, again, forecasting, cash flow.

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Delegate CFO: But they only really needed it part-time.

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Delegate CFO: And so, you know, being in the public accounting world, I’ve seen a lot of different processes, procedures, industries. And so, with that, I decided it was best to design and develop a firm that really services those small and medium companies that they really need the help

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Delegate CFO: But they don’t need it if somebody’s sitting there full-time.

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Delegate CFO: I’m also a CPA, a certified public accountant, as well as a certified forensic accountant. So, in my other role, I do forensic investigations, mainly looking for fraud.

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Delegate CFO: on both civil and criminal cases. So, I do, have that other aspect, and I bring that to the respective

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Delegate CFO: company of delegate CFO, so all our respective companies that we bring on, I will do a thorough internal control review of their processes and procedures, in addition to, obviously, doing the standard CFO role.

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Delegate CFO: This webinar, again, the agenda is

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Delegate CFO: we want to, again, demystify how the process is and what we as a firm do when you come on. You know, we have set criteria and set metrics that we go through, so that once we get to the 90 days.

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Delegate CFO: We are off and running, and we’re helping you make your business more profitable.

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Delegate CFO: And again, like I said, we hope that this is going to be very informative and, again, takes out some of those questions you may have.

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Delegate CFO: So, why does the first 90 days matter?

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Delegate CFO: Well, this is ultimately the foundation for a successful partnership.

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Delegate CFO: And this really ensures that we’re aligning, all our goals, and we’re doing quick wins.

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Delegate CFO: Because in this time frame, this is when we’re able to determine what is the best aspect for your respective company. So that’s why this is… this particular time frame is so critical to, again, build the foundation and launch the company, forward as we go through.

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Delegate CFO: Now, common questions we normally get…

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Delegate CFO: is, you know, what does onboarding look like? You know, how soon will I see results?

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Delegate CFO: How much input is expected from me, me being you, the client, and then what’s the communication process? Again, these are the very standard questions that we get. Of course, we get more questions, but these are kind of the common ones, so we’re going to go through and answer those as we go through each of these respective slides.

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Delegate CFO: Now.

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Delegate CFO: The process that we go through, and we have kind of a set criteria, is on our 90-day timeline.

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Delegate CFO: We break it down into four main sections. First one, obviously, is the kickoff and intro. You know, we introduce ourselves, we do the kickoff. Weeks 1 through 2, we do a discovery process. Weeks 3 through 6.

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Delegate CFO: An assessment, and then 7 through 12, we implement and do, early impact on the respective recommendations.

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Delegate CFO: So, let’s go into weeks 1 and 2. So, obviously, we do the standard kickoff. We meet with leadership and key stakeholders. Usually, we’ll meet with the ownership first, because they’re going to be the ones that are really driving a lot of

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Delegate CFO: what processes and procedures and services that we’re going to perform. And so, we’ll meet with them. And the big item, and this is really the biggest thing throughout this whole process, is that second bullet point in the slide you’re seeing is.

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Delegate CFO: Understanding the business’s goals.

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Delegate CFO: Obviously, we want to know the pain points and current processes.

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Delegate CFO: But your goal for your business is the biggest driver on everything that we will build, either, you know, from the forecast, to the KPIs, to the cash flow.

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Delegate CFO: Whatever your respective business goal is, is going to be the biggest key to this whole process. And one business’s goal could be completely different from another business’s goal. So, case in point, you know, you could be a manufacturing company.

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Delegate CFO: And you just want to make sure that you’re making net income by the end of every year.

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Delegate CFO: Whereas another goal could be, you know, you’re a mature company, and you’re looking to sell in 3 years, and so you want to build up your financials.

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Delegate CFO: each company, even if they’re in the same industry, is going to have slightly different goals. Now, obviously, one of the main goals is obviously to make net income, but outside of that, there are specific goals that we want to understand as a CFO firm.

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Delegate CFO: And we want to be able to use that to go ahead and develop everything, both with communications and with processes and procedures. Obviously, in the kickoff phase, discovery phase, we’re going to be collecting a bunch of information, you know, existing financial system, data systems.

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Delegate CFO: And we’re going to be setting expectations for communications and deliverables. So, when we first bring on a client, we’re going to have a fairly lengthy list of items we’re going to need, you know, such as, you know, tax returns, chart of accounts, org charts, you name it. There’s a lot of information that we need to be able to

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Delegate CFO: Access and look at, as we’re building everything in the background.

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Delegate CFO: And because that list is so big, sometimes what we do is we will break that list down into manageable chunks. So, let’s say we have a list of 20 items, and it’s September 1st, we may say, okay, these first 5 items.

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Delegate CFO: We don’t need these until September 10th. You know, the next 5 items may not be until September 15th, and so we’ll put specific dates on items that we need. And obviously, the most critical items are going to be the items we need first. But in there, we’re going to build it out so it’s manageable.

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Delegate CFO: And so, we will be communicating with you on that process of saying, here’s the list of information we need, here’s what we have received.

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Delegate CFO: This is what’s coming up, you know, and we’ll send notifications on that as well. Now, a lot of our clients sometimes will just knock out, you know, the whole list within a week, which is great. But again, we want to make it so it’s not too onerous when you’re going through and getting that information, or the request from us.

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Delegate CFO: Now, weeks 3 through 6, this is where we start doing the deep dive assessment. You know, we’re going to be analyzing your financials, your processes, and your systems. Again, we’re going to be looking at a lot of your historical data.

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Delegate CFO: We’re gonna also go look at, you know, identify gaps, risks, and opportunities. Now, the risks are gonna be, both from a cash flow standpoint and from an internal control standpoint.

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Delegate CFO: And again, we are probably one of, if not the only firm that has a forensic accountant on staff.

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Delegate CFO: That we are going to go through, and we’re going to analyze your internal controls. We’re going to make sure there’s no weaknesses in there, because you can build the most pristine budget, forecast, cash flow, runway, all that can be just absolutely perfect.

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Delegate CFO: But if somebody’s stealing from you, that’s not going to matter. And so, that’s why we make it key that we want to make sure that your internal controls are as airtight as possible. Now, we understand sometimes, you know, we have to mitigate certain controls because of staffing issues or shortages.

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Delegate CFO: But we want to make sure that they’re as tight as possible.

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Delegate CFO: Then, you know, we’re gonna benchmark your performance against your industry standards.

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Delegate CFO: And again, we do this because, you know, we’re looking at your data, but we want to know what are your competitors doing? You know, is your gross margin, say, 20%, but your competitor’s gross margin is 30%? You know, we’re going to start benchmarking that data, because then that starts giving us ideas as to

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Delegate CFO: Where are there, opportunities? Where are there inefficiencies, that can be,

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Delegate CFO: Exploited and also increased or made better within the company.

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Delegate CFO: And then we’re gonna start building your dashboards.

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Delegate CFO: And, obviously, the reporting tools. Now, on the dashboards, the key part to this, and this goes back to that very first slide where we talked about the goals.

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Delegate CFO: We’re gonna build your key performance indicators, your KPIs.

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Delegate CFO: And those KPIs have got to be relevant to your goal. Now, we don’t…

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Delegate CFO: believe in putting a KPI in there that really isn’t relevant to what your goal is. So if your goal is to get to, say.

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Delegate CFO: 1.2 million in revenue by the end of the year. We know we have to average $100,000 in revenue per month, you know, then we may be breaking it down to, okay, this is how many sales per day you need to have, or how many units you need to have.

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Delegate CFO: And so, we’re going to be developing those KPIs that allow you to actually manage your company towards that goal, not give you a KPI such as, you know, the current ratio, which is current assets over current liabilities that…

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Delegate CFO: yeah, that gives you a number, and, you know, we call those warm and fuzzies, because they look good, but they don’t really help you manage your company. So we’re going to be developing those dashboards that actually help you manage your company. Sometimes you’ll hear it classified as a financial lever, because there’s different levers that you can use within your company to get to that ultimate goal.

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Delegate CFO: And then, of course, obviously, we’re going to be putting in early recommendations, and communicating with those. If we start seeing, items, you know, say there’s a lot of accounts receivable that probably could be collected.

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Delegate CFO: There was maybe a sale that didn’t get recorded that, you know, should be recorded, now you’ve got a receivable to collect. Again, we’re gonna go through and get those early wins for you, as we go and analyze your information.

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Delegate CFO: Now, obviously, we’re going to put these quick wins, in recommendations into actions for you. If it is a collection item.

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Delegate CFO: Can we adjust how you collect the respective receivables? Is it possible you get a retainer instead of doing collections type situation? You know, so whatever that recommendation is, we’re going to go through and see what we can put in place. We’re going to address your highest, you know, priority risk. You know, this is obviously internal controls.

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Delegate CFO: But we’re also going to look at, you know, revenue. You know, if you’re making a widget, you know, are you utilizing the capacity correctly? Can we adjust that capacity flow?

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Delegate CFO: is that we need to order more inventory so that, you know, we’re coming up on the holiday season, and we need to make sure you don’t run out, because then those are lost sales. You know, whatever those respective items are, we’re going to start highlighting those.

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Delegate CFO: And again, we’re going to implement and improve the reporting, both on your financial statements and also on your key performance indicators, so…

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Delegate CFO: From a financial statement standpoint, we’re going to make sure that they’re consistent, and when you look at just your core financial statements, you’re able to easily analyze and understand why the structure’s set up the way it is, and how that flows through, all of the respective statements from the balance sheet to the income statement to the statement of cash flows.

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Delegate CFO: And again, regular… we’re going to do regular leadership meetings, and one of the benefits of having.

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Delegate CFO: us on as your virtual CFO is, yes, we’re very focused on accounting and processes, cash flow, etc.

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Delegate CFO: But a lot of times, our clients will actually use us as sounding boards for items that we’re not real… that’s not really our industry, such as, you know, SEO. They may be working on their website and trying to get search engine, to increase, and sometimes they’ll use us as a sounding board, you know what I mean? So it’s not uncommon for one of our meetings

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Delegate CFO: To digress into an area that’s really not, our forte.

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Delegate CFO: But, you know, as a sounding board, as a business leader, they like to bounce ideas off us, so we’re also involved in that as well.

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Delegate CFO: And of course, we will adjust any action plan as needed.

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Delegate CFO: Now, typical early deliverables.

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Delegate CFO: We are going to improve the clarity on your cash flow. You know, as obviously one of the things what we’ll go through is we’re going to analyze your cash flow, make sure that, you know, if you have a runway, you’re not getting too close to the runway, and runway being… you run out of cash. We’re going to streamline your financial process.

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Delegate CFO: So that you’re getting your financials timely. You know, it doesn’t do you as a business leader.

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Delegate CFO: any good to get your financials for, say, July and October. That doesn’t do you any good, because we’ve already had other months go through.

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Delegate CFO: So we want to make sure we streamline that process, and you get the information timely. Obviously, you know, with our dashboards and your metrics, we’re going to allow those, again, to be able to adjust, on the fly.

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Delegate CFO: you know, how your company’s doing. You know, if revenue was supposed to be, say, $50,000 in July, and you’re only at, say, $10,000, and it’s July 15th, okay, how do we make sure that we move forward to be able to get

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Delegate CFO: you know, to that 50,000 mark, you know, another 40,000 within the next 15 days. Again, we’re going to be building that into respective dashboards.

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Delegate CFO: We’re also going to be analyzing, you know, cost savings and revenue opportunities. So, case in point, one of our clients that we had was a manufacturing client.

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Delegate CFO: And their product.

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Delegate CFO: could be used on aircraft. It was, you know, engineered to be able to be used on aircraft.

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Delegate CFO: However, they didn’t have the respective designation stamp that you need to have to be able to sell on that.

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Delegate CFO: And once we identified that, they were able to actually go through that process, and now they’re able to sell the aircraft, and so they just increased the revenue on a product they’re already making anyways. Now, they had to make, you know, several little adjustments, engineering adjustments to the product, but for the most part, that was another revenue opportunity they had.

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Delegate CFO: And then from here, we’re now gonna start doing a roadmap for the next steps. You know, how do we grow your company? How do we increase your return on investment? You know, what does year 2, 3 start to look like? Once we’ve built that foundation on the first 90 days, then we can start doing a launch and go forward onto

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Delegate CFO: Ultimately, where you want your company to be in the future.

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Delegate CFO: Now, your role in this. Now, we need the information timely, you know, that is a key, you know, we can only work with the information that we’ve obtained, and so that’s what we tell our clients is.

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Delegate CFO: We’ll usually give you kind of deadlines, you know, again, back to that first slide where we talked about the lists. We break down the respective dates on there. So, that gives you an idea, as a client.

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Delegate CFO: okay, I need to get this information over to them, or make it available to them by this time. And so we need to have timely information, not only information, but also, communication. So, open and honest communication.

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Delegate CFO: If you’re indicating that, you know, yes, we’re going to hit $50,000 in July, we built the budget that way, but then it’s looking like that’s not going to happen.

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Delegate CFO: The sooner you communicate with us, the sooner we can go ahead and make the adjustments so that

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Delegate CFO: Yeah, we might not hit that in July, but how can we make it up in August, September, October?

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Delegate CFO: Also, this allows us to react if something significant happens, such as your supplier for a main part of your raw materials is now in trouble, and you’re trying to figure out where to get your information, you know, your respective raw materials.

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Delegate CFO: And so, that’s one of the things, is when you know information like that, go ahead and communicate that to us so we can react on our side to be able to help you make your decisions that really are going to impact the future.

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Delegate CFO: And then, of course, you know, setting clear goals and expectations. You know, it’s… if you truly expect to get to $1.2 million in revenue, say.

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Delegate CFO: then let’s make sure we’re communicating that, and we’re meeting those expectations. And then regular feedback. Again, we have regular meetings, that we meet with a client, so all feedback, back and forth, both from us and to us, and from you to you, we make sure that we’re constantly doing that regular feedback.

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Delegate CFO: No.

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Delegate CFO: a sample communication plan. So, with all our clients, we will set up a standing meeting. You know, these are weekly meetings.

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Delegate CFO: And we’ll just, you know, when we do the initial onboarding, we’ll go through and try to figure out what day and time works best for you each week.

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Delegate CFO: Now, normally we don’t do Mondays and Fridays. We have yet to actually have a client want to do those, but normally we try to exclude those days of the week, just because Mondays you’re coming out of the weekend, and Fridays, a lot of times, people are taking off early.

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Delegate CFO: And so, you know, pretty much Tuesday, Thursday, we try to set up a standing meeting. Again, we set up one hour. Don’t always need one hour on there, but we’ll set that up.

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Delegate CFO: And it’s one of those meetings that, you know, we may only meet for 5 minutes one week, because there isn’t much to go over, whereas the next week, we may go over the full hour.

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Delegate CFO: But again, we will be there every single week at that designated time, and if you’re not able to, or, you know, things happen that you’re not able to make it, that’s fine, but we just want to make sure we’re always on that respective calendar.

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Delegate CFO: The other aspect is, sometimes you may say, you know what, I don’t want to meet every week, I just want to meet once a month. We have had clients that just meet once a month, you know, we’ll shoot you emails back and forth and WhatsApp communication.

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Delegate CFO: But an actual meeting can sometimes only happen once a month. And then we have some clients that, you know, sometimes they’ll need two meetings in one week type situation. But we want to make sure we have that standing meeting so we’re always there, always available, everybody knows that’s when we’re going to meet and go over.

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Delegate CFO: Whether it’s the, you know, the past financials, you know, we’re doing a monthly recap report, or we’re going over the, pipe, you know, the sales pipeline, or we’re going through cash flow, there’s going to be a topic, and each one of our meetings has a set agenda. We set an agenda, and we have specific items that we want to cover on that respective meeting.

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Delegate CFO: And again, we have an open-door policy. If an urgent question comes up, say you’re meeting with a prospective customer, or a marketing channel or sales channel.

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Delegate CFO: And you need to know, okay, they’re asking for an extra 10% discount, you know, should I pull the trigger on this type situation. So yeah, a lot of times we are available for those kind of urgent questions to say, yeah, go ahead, or wait a minute, hold off, you know, try to get it to 5% versus 10% because of, you know, margin or cash flow.

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Delegate CFO: And then we use collateral tools

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Delegate CFO: WhatsApp tends to be a very popular communication app that we currently use with our clients. Obviously, email, and then, of course, shared docs. It’s not uncommon that a client will

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Delegate CFO: put something into, like, a Google Drive, Google Sheet, and then share it with us, and then we’ll go back and forth on that respective document.

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Delegate CFO: No.

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Delegate CFO: We want to do… just give you a real quick, real-world case study.

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Delegate CFO: And on this instance, One of our clients, they were a medical provider.

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Delegate CFO: And they provided these medical services.

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Delegate CFO: And when they came to us, they pretty much were kind of just operating the business, but not really knowing where they were going. You know, they were, you know, bringing in the prospective patients, you know, building the insurance.

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Delegate CFO: You know, collecting the funds and kind of going through there, but they didn’t really have any kind of direction.

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Delegate CFO: And so when we met with them, and also they were having cash flow issues as well.

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Delegate CFO: And so, when we met with them, you know, we first analyzed their financial statements, and we got those all tied out. And one of the things we do with our respective clients, and we do it with all our clients, but with them also, is we do what’s called a mini-audit.

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Delegate CFO: So every month on your financial statements, we will actually audit the balance sheet. So, in other words, here’s the balance that says cash, okay, that’s got to be tied out to a bank statement and the bank rec.

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Delegate CFO: here’s the accounts receivable, you know, it’s tied out to the AR subsidiary ledger. So, one thing for those of you who are unfamiliar with financial statement audits.

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Delegate CFO: is, at its core, a financial statement audit is really just making sure everything on the balance sheet ties to some sort of source documents. That’s really the core. Now, there’s a whole bunch of other procedures and tests and everything you have to do a financial audit, but

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Delegate CFO: For our clients, that’s the main starting point for the financials, is we’ll do a mini-audit. So, when they first came on, we went through and did a mini audit, and we realized, you know, some of their information wasn’t correct and had to be moved in different categories, or had to be updated.

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Delegate CFO: And when we started looking at their respective information, we realized

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Delegate CFO: The best way for them to manage their particular company was…

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Delegate CFO: the per diem rates. So, in their particular situation, they got a per diem rate from the insurance company, and it usually was based on the patient days. And we were able to analyze and say, okay, if you’re at this level on patient days, let’s say it’s 6 patient days per day.

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Delegate CFO: you’re breaking even, so you need to be above the 6 patient days, so let’s say 8 is where they’re at now, or they’ve got up to 8.

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Delegate CFO: And so, because we were able to break that down, we were able to give them the tools to actually manage the company. Now, this isn’t necessarily saying here’s your total revenue, it’s actually a non-financial aspect of looking at the actual patient days.

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Delegate CFO: And they were able to look at that, and the COO and CEO were able to analyze that, and they actually had software that literally gave them reports daily as to what their patient days were.

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Delegate CFO: And with that information, they were able to say, okay.

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Delegate CFO: We’re currently averaging… let’s say their break-even again was 6, they’re currently averaging 5.

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Delegate CFO: then they were able to analyze and say, how do we get it up? If we don’t get it up, we’re going to have a cash flow issue, maybe not this month, but into the next month.

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Delegate CFO: And so they were able to use that to analyze their financials and really adjust it, so they were able to go through and

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Delegate CFO: Looking, you know, with their marketing team, and be able to go through that process and determine, okay, let’s get that built up.

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Delegate CFO: And so they were constantly monitoring that particular KPI. Now, there’s other KPIs that were built into this particular company, but that was one of the bigger ones, that they were able to put that together, they were able to extend out their cash flow, and they were able to actually ramp up the business. So they were able to understand

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Delegate CFO: Not only what was going through the business, but how to keep managing it and keep an eye on it.

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Delegate CFO: Now, common roadblocks and how we address them.

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Delegate CFO: data access and quality issues. Now, obviously, we need to have access to respective accounting, information, and usually that’s going to be, like, a QuickBooks or Xero, type program that we can get through online.

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Delegate CFO: But the quality issues usually stem from, one, we’re going through and we’re doing the mini audits.

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Delegate CFO: But two, a lot of times, when we come across quality issues, it’s because the accountant

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Delegate CFO: At that… your respective organization, or their respective organization.

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Delegate CFO: had not been either trained, or nobody ever reviewed their work, so they didn’t know, you know, one, they were doing something incorrectly, or two, they needed to be able to go through this process. And one of the things that we noticed, in particular one of our clients that we started with.

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Delegate CFO: was…

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Delegate CFO: the CFO had left, and so then the owner brought us in, and the accountant who was still there.

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Delegate CFO: we realized he wasn’t properly trained. A very smart individual, but he just wasn’t trained. He came right out of college, started working for the company, and as we went through the process, we were actually able to train him to understand this is the process you need to go. For instance.

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Delegate CFO: they would only tie out accounts receivable at the end of the year. So they wouldn’t actually even look at accounts receivable throughout the year. And this is a manufacturing company that would sell their product, you know, monthly. And so…

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Delegate CFO: those accounts receivable weren’t done, and so we were able to train them, one, that has to be done at a minimum monthly, and when he started going through the process, he started understanding, okay, this is really what I need to do. And so that was one of the things that, you know, when we see quality issues.

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Delegate CFO: It’s usually because those individuals had just had never been trained or didn’t understand this is actually the way we should be doing, or they should be doing this process. The resistance to change and misaligned goals, those tend to, kind of…

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Delegate CFO: mirror or even match one another. And what we’ve came across is a lot of times, when we’ll come in.

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Delegate CFO: certain individuals are used to doing the, you know, the this is how we’ve always done it mentality. And, you know, with one of the clients that we had, they had a particular product. It was a labor-intensive product, took up a lot of machine hours, and took a lot of material.

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Delegate CFO: And it was one of those products that they only sold to one client, but this was, like, a legacy client that they’d had forever. And this legacy client happened… actually happened to be a very difficult client, you know, one of the ones that, you know, they complain about not getting their order, but then they take forever to pay their order, and then they want discounts, you know, so on and so forth.

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Delegate CFO: And so, on that particular instance, we analyzed that product that the customer or our client was building, and we realized, yes, there’s a good gross margin on that particular product.

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Delegate CFO: But you have better gross margins on these other products that, you know, when you build the product for that customer, it takes up all those resources, and you can’t build the one with the higher margin. And so…

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Delegate CFO: We went through and we analyzed and said, no, we really need to stop making this product, because we only sell it to one person, and it eats up a lot more revenue, net income on these other products.

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Delegate CFO: And so, you know, working with management and ownership, kind of made that decision that, you know, let’s, you know, phase this product out.

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Delegate CFO: And when we would meet with the COO, you know, they had a resistance not to get rid of the product, but, you know, we walked through the process and said.

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Delegate CFO: The company’s gonna make more money building these particular products,

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Delegate CFO: by, you know, not doing this product, you have the time to be able to, and I believe it was, like, 2 or 3 products for the amount of time and space that it took for that one product.

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Delegate CFO: And so, a lot of times, we work with them, you know, the individuals that may have resistance on there, and just communicate, you know, open, honestly, that, you know, there’s a reason why we’re going through this process. And so we always try to be very proactive in that particular discussion.

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Delegate CFO: So, what happens after the first 90 days?

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Delegate CFO: So, again, first 90 days is we’re tying out your information, we’re building your KPIs, we’re, you know, determining what your goals are. If you have it, we’ll help you build your forecast, your budget, and then also build your forecast. So we’ve got all that base built in.

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Delegate CFO: Now we get into the real strategy part.

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Delegate CFO: And one of the big roles of a CFO is to do strategy.

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Delegate CFO: And when you build your budget for the current year, so right now it’s 2025, and you build your budget for 2025,

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Delegate CFO: Your budget for 2025, theoretically, should be built off of your strategy that you’ve built for the next, say, 3 to 5 years.

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Delegate CFO: And what that means is, you know, if you’re, say, you’re a $5 million revenue right now, and you ultimately want to get to $15 million revenue.

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Delegate CFO: you… odds are you probably can’t go from $5 million to 15 million in one year. So, you need to be able to have a plan and a strategy in place to say, okay, I can’t do it in one year, but I could probably do it in three years. So, year one, I want to be at 5 million.

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Delegate CFO: Year two, say, $7 million, and then year three, we get up to the $15 million. And so…

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Delegate CFO: to get to that point, we need to have an actual strategy in place. And once we have that, then we back down to, obviously, how much products we need to sell, how much services, how much floor space, inventory, etc. We start breaking it down to the actual micro level.

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Delegate CFO: And then from there, that will dictate what your budget’s going to be for the next year. So, again, right now it’s 2025. You know, let’s say, you know, to get to that $15 million, we have to have now $7 million in revenue for the next year.

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Delegate CFO: we already know what our, you know, main goal is for revenue, so now we can start breaking, you know, building that respective budget. Because again, when you want to do that big jump, a lot of times there’s other factors built in that you need to be ready or have in place before you can even make that jump, such as

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Delegate CFO: you know, expand your factory floor, or if you’re a service organization, you know, I need to have 3 more techs on staff, or I need 3 more, you know, staff attorneys on staff. Whatever the case may be.

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Delegate CFO: you need to be able to have that in place so that then you can actually get to that $7 million, because if you’re maxed out, passed to get $5 million, odds of, you know, getting to that $7 million are slim. So, again.

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Delegate CFO: After that first 90 days, we’re gonna start helping you build that strategy, you know. A lot of times that strategy takes a while. You know, that takes, you know, several days of meetings, back and forth, fine-tuning.

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Delegate CFO: We’ll build it out, see, you know, is this even reasonable, logical, you know, is it even feasible? Is there even enough raw material in the world to do this? You know, those type of questions, we’ll go through that, and once we have that.

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Delegate CFO: Then we can start backtracking and start building your budgets.

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Delegate CFO: And again, this will develop a deeper value beyond just kind of the quick ones that we’ve

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Delegate CFO: Gone through. And then, obviously, if there’s additional add-on services, you know.

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Delegate CFO: we can discuss those. Now, our particular company, we’re up front with our pricing. You know, we do not want to charge you for something you don’t need. So that’s why, if you’re curious on how our pricing goes, go to our pricing page, and there’s a quick little video. But ultimately.

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Delegate CFO: if you don’t need it, you don’t pay for it, type situation. You know, we’ve all had cable TV where, you know, you only wanted to watch 5 channels, but you’re paying for 100 channels.

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Delegate CFO: you don’t want to be paying for those other, you know, so many channels that you’re not even going to watch. And so that’s kind of the mindset here is.

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Delegate CFO: If you really don’t need it, we’re not going to charge you for that, and we want to adjust your fee to what really, truly the services that you truly need.

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Delegate CFO: Now…

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Delegate CFO: questions. I thank you, for those of you who sent in those questions, I apologize for waiting till the end, but I wanted to kind of get through all those slides first.

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Delegate CFO: First question here, can you work with our existing software and tools?

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Delegate CFO: Yes, we can work with

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Delegate CFO: pretty much all the major, accounting platforms, such as, you know, obviously QuickBooks, Xero, etc.

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Delegate CFO: We also work with some of our clients that have …

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Delegate CFO: software that’s kind of a higher-end software that isn’t, you know, the QuickBooks Zero, and we can work with those. It may take us a little bit longer, for a learning curve, but usually we can work with those. Case in point, you know.

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Delegate CFO: some of our manufacturing clients use ECI, which is kind of the main umbrella for a lot of the manufacturer modules underneath that respective company, such as M1.

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Delegate CFO: Macs, et cetera, et cetera. And so we’ve worked with a lot of those, and once we get that learning curve down, we can definitely work with it. Again, if it’s not the standard ones that you see, it may take a little bit, but

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Delegate CFO: In the end, it’s always important to note that debits and credits are always the same in a software, it’s just, where’s the software putting it, and how’s the software set up?

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Delegate CFO: Can I switch or cancel if my needs change?

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Delegate CFO: Absolutely.

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Delegate CFO: You know, we are… you should consider us more of a service agreement than a long-term contract. Again, if it gets to the point that, you know, you need to reduce the services because they really don’t need it anymore. So let’s, for instance, say, you know, as part of the services, we were helping you with the banker relationship.

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Delegate CFO: And, you know, let’s say the loan is done, and your cash flow is to a point that you don’t even need to worry about doing the banking anymore.

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Delegate CFO: yeah, we can go ahead and take that service off and adjust the fees accordingly. So yes, we are nimble enough on that, and again, we don’t have long-term contracts. We just ask that, you know, if there is a change in service or anything like that, we just have 15 to 30 days, just so we can adjust all the respective processes.

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Delegate CFO: Who will I work with, and how often do we meet?

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Delegate CFO: So…

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Delegate CFO: myself, again, I’m the founder of the company, I’m involved all the clients, and especially the first 90 days, I’m heavily, heavily involved. I will be involved in all the meetings as well, because I want to make sure that you’re getting the service that you need and deserve.

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Delegate CFO: And that your companies are moving forward. And again, how often do we meet? Again, we set up standing meetings, weekly standing meetings.

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Delegate CFO: Again, it’s up to you, the client, whether you want to do those weekly or bi-weekly. That process is really up to you, but we will make sure that we’re available for those meetings at that set time every week. And then, of course, we can always be reached by email, WhatsApp, type situations.

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Delegate CFO: How much does a virtual CFO cost

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Delegate CFO: And what do I get for my investment?

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Delegate CFO: So, a virtual CFO cost is really variable.

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Delegate CFO: On what you need.

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Delegate CFO: So, it can range from, say, $1,100 a week to $900 a week, or maybe even somewhere in between. And again, with our firm.

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Delegate CFO: we adjust the fee based on what you actually need. And so, you know, again, if you go to our pricing page, you know, there’s a short little video, kind of walks you through the steps that, you know, there are certain aspects within the service that, if you don’t need it, you don’t pay for it. And so we kind of go through, and when we meet with you before you come on.

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Delegate CFO: we’ll have a set fee. You know, we’ll say, okay, you know, we’ll meet with you and say, okay, you’re gonna need this service, this service, and this service, you don’t need these 5 items, and so this is it. There’s your set fee. And then for our company, whatever that fee is, let’s just say it’s $1,000 a week.

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Delegate CFO: whatever that fee is, that fee is fixed for one continuous year. Now, it’s not a long-term contract, it’s just that fee is fixed within your service agreement with us. And so, we always stress that with our clients is.

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Delegate CFO: We don’t change it once we get to that point. Now, there may be add-on services, or maybe, you know, there are services that you don’t need anymore that will adjust it.

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Delegate CFO: But we’ll never do additional billings. You know, that famous thing that you see from, you know, attorneys and CPA firms, where you get that mysterious little bill that all of a sudden shows up that you didn’t know about.

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Delegate CFO: We don’t do that. So, whatever that fee is that, you know, we determined on our initial meeting, that is going to be the fixed fee for one continuous year. And then, of course, after one year, we’ll sit and evaluate how that fee structure is built.

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Delegate CFO: And then, of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t ask the last part. And what do I do… what do I get from my investment? Well.

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Delegate CFO: you’re gonna get your financials tied out, accurately, so it’s gonna be tied out to respective information, i.e, like you said, the mini-audit. Your internal controls will be analyzed, by a forensic accountant, and, you know, control, you know, firm controls are put in place.

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Delegate CFO: And the important thing to think about, on those internal controls.

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Delegate CFO: and I stress this several times with some, you know, some of our newer clients.

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Delegate CFO: If somebody steals from you, they’re gonna steal from your net income, which is your bottom line. Even though they may steal sales, you know, a customer comes in to your place of business, pays $1,000, they take the money, they pocket it, they stole it.

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Delegate CFO: Even though that was a sale, in reality, they’re really stealing from their net income. So…

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Delegate CFO: Case in point, somebody stole $1,000 from you, and your net percent is 10%. So net is… your net income divided by your sales is 10%.

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Delegate CFO: you have to earn $1,000 divided by that 10%, so that’s $10,000, so you need to bring in another $10,000 in sales just to make up for that $1,000 that was stolen. So, part of our service is we analyze your internal controls, because again, like I said in the beginning.

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Delegate CFO: Doesn’t matter how great your forecast, budgets, cash flow, all that is, if somebody’s stealing from you, it’s going to completely wreck all that respective information. So, we’re going to go through your internal controls.

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Delegate CFO: We’re going to help you build an actual strategy for the next 3, possibly 5 years. We’re going to be helping you with not only your budget, but your forecast, and also to be able to react to, you know, maybe certain situations that impact your cash flow, such as a tariff.

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Delegate CFO: you know, all of a sudden, there’s a 30% tariff that comes up. How does that impact your margin? How does that impact your cash flow? Can you pass that on to your customer? Again, we’re going to be part of that, because in reality, we really are part of your C-suite. We’re just on a part-time and reduced-cost basis, as opposed to having a full-time CFO sitting there.

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Delegate CFO: And then one last question.

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Delegate CFO: Can you implement faster than 90 days? Yes, we can implement faster than 90 days. It just… that just requires communication and information from you to come to us at a much faster pace than normal.

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Delegate CFO: Again, if we have that, and we’re getting that information quickly, we can do it faster. Now, there’s only so much faster that we can do on that, but yeah, we can definitely do it, implement faster. And if you recall, on the last part of our timeline, it said 7 to 12 weeks.

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Delegate CFO: you know, we could get closer to that 8 weeks, you know, if we get all that information in, we get access to their respective accounting data, and there’s no issues that we have to go back and fix on the historical stuff. So yeah, we can implement faster than 90 days.

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Delegate CFO: So… Again.

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Delegate CFO: Thank you for attending. My name’s Steve Hallman. I’m the founder of Delegate CFO. I’m a CPA as well as a certified forensic accountant.

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Delegate CFO: And if you want to know… learn more about our company, you can visit us at DelegateCFO.com. And again, if you want to know more about our pricing, we have a set pricing page in there as well. So, again, I hope that this respective

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Delegate CFO: webinar demystified for you what happens once you bring on, a virtual CFO, at least, at least

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Delegate CFO: on how our particular company does that, and I hope that if you have any questions, again, please feel free to contact me. Again, my email is on that previous slide, or if you have any questions, you can reach us at steve at delegatecfo.com. I thank you, and I hope you have a great day.