Twenty years in the CFO seat — audit, growth, financing, and a Heineken acquisition. Now senior-only, capacity-capped finance for owner-managed businesses, through CFO Science.
No junior tier. The founder signs every set of books that leaves the practice. AI inside the work, not on top of it. The savings show up in the price, not the pitch.
Bookkeeping and controllership are routinely framed as transactions. They are not. The value is in the standing call, the off-cycle text, the question asked before it’s a problem. We price for the relationship and design the practice around protecting it.
We use AI to code transactions, flag anomalies, draft commentary, and accelerate the mechanical layer. The savings show up in the price, not the marketing. Clients don’t pay for “AI”; they pay for accurate books and useful counsel, delivered on time.
We will never put “powered by AI” on a deliverable. The deliverable speaks for itself, or it doesn’t.
Boutique finance firms routinely promise senior attention and deliver junior work. Our practice is small on purpose. There is no escalation path because there is no junior tier — the senior accountant is the work, not the supervisor.
Most engagements that go badly were predictable from the discovery call. We turn down work where the math doesn’t fit, where the cadence won’t hold, or where the chemistry isn’t there. The honest “no” is part of the offer.
Most of finance is repetition done correctly. We don’t dress it up. The board pack is the board pack, the close is closed by the 8th, the cash forecast is updated weekly. The novelty is in the work being reliable.
The full thinking behind the model — on the CFO Science About page.
Read it →Clean, reconciled, done right the first time — a foundation you can actually decide from.
Bookkeeping →The controller function run so the board never has to ask twice. Monthly close, on time.
Controllership →Senior judgment on cash, financing and exit-readiness — five to seven clients, no more.
Fractional CFO →I trained as an auditor at Grant Thornton, so I learned early what a clean set of books actually has to survive. From there I built and operated businesses of my own — two that I held equity in and saw through to successful sales — and founded Vatwire, which I exited by sale and which is still running today.
I was CFO of a SaaS company, Loyalty Markets, where I helped grow revenue 3.5× over three years. And in 2019 I was Director of Operational Strategy at Touchsides through its acquisition by Heineken — the strategic budget and the quality-of-earnings work, the kind of process where the numbers stop being a report and start being evidence.
Audit, ownership, scaling, a deal. I’ve been in the seat for each one. That’s what I bring to CFO Science: not a template, but someone who has already been where your business is going.
A full-time CFO costs $250K–$400K all-in. For most businesses between $5M and $50M, that’s senior judgment you’ll underuse. Here’s the math — and the point where it flips.
Read →A 13-week rolling cash forecast is not a CFO tool — it’s the minimum visibility any owner-managed business needs to make decisions without regret.
Read →The three structural reasons most owner-managed businesses close two to four weeks late — and what that lag actually costs you.
Read →That’s a different conversation, so I keep it on a different page. I’m not an outside financial buyer — I’ve sat in the operator’s seat. If you’ve built a bookkeeping or accounting practice and you’re thinking about succession, I’d tell you plainly how I’d operate what you built, and why I’d be a different kind of buyer.
The different conversation →Thirty minutes, confidential. You leave with a short written read on your situation — whether or not we end up working together.