Most of us are home owners. With home ownership comes the responsibility of maintaining your homes… doing yard work, trimming trees, cleaning the pool, servicing and maintaining equipment and appliances, etc. The list goes on and on. The challenges most home owners face are time and expertise. Most neither know how to properly maintain their homes nor do they have the time because of their demanding professional lives and busy families. So what is the solution? Home owners often outsource these responsibilities to professionals. Enter the yard guy, the tree guy, the pool boy and the handyman. The outcome is a house well maintained, more time to focus on their career and spend with family.
If you are also a business owner, you face a very similar situation when running your business… managing your workforce, staying at the forefront of technology, marketing your products and services, staying out of legal troubles and the most dreaded one of all – managing your accounting, finance and reporting compliance. For most business owners, managing the accounting function is simply a distraction from what they love to do – growing their business. Accounting is mostly seen as a regulatory burden and most small to medium sized businesses do not have the time or expertise to proactively manage their business finances. This is especially true for emerging and fast growing businesses when most of the resources are dedicated to marketing and growing sales. To make matters worse, it is often difficult for businesses to find competent accounting professionals. The end result is a frustrated business owner unable to rely on his books and records and for outside accountants to spend a significant amount of time fixing errors clients make.
So what is the solution? Enter CFO Connections – accountants and business owners’ life saver. We want to share with you the struggles that some of our clients faced and how we were able to cure their pains for them.
An SEC reporting company is in an industry that is rapidly accelerating and growing. The founder of the operations maintains dual role as the company’s CEO and CFO. With investors knocking on his door, he knew that he was in the right place at the right time and that it is important to maintain reliable information for existing and potential investors. However, he couldn’t find the time away from managing the company’s accounting, reporting, compliance and risk management issues. CFO Connections was hired to manage these important functions for the company. With the pain of handling the accounting off his shoulders, our client was finally able to devote more time on investor relations and bring better focus to operations. We have been successful in eliminating the CEO and CFO’s stress by collaborating with the company’s auditors, attorneys and insurance brokers on important accounting, reporting, compliance and risk management matters.
Another one of our clients has a great accounting team in place but is lacking the expertise to handle an element in their accounting and reporting function that requires a heavy dose of management’s estimates. This has become a stressor for the company in meeting its reporting deadlines. CFO Connections was brought in to cure this pain for our client. We provided a road map for the CFO in developing its estimates, helped him anticipate questions from the auditor and provided a disclosure framework that was easy to follow. The end result was the new found time and expertise for our client. CFO Connections is now part of the company’s strategic growth team to help align the proper resources and position the company for growth.
A fast growing service company has great plans for growth but its financial controller just wasn’t on the same page with the company and eventually parted ways with the company. Due to rapid growth, the company was in desperate need of finding a financial controller before the accounting becomes unmanageable. In the interim, the company hired CFO Connections as its interim financial controller. We not only bridged the “GAAP” for the company, but also saw areas where improvements were much needed, e.g. internal controls, team coaching and mentoring, financial planning and analysis, etc. We were able to eliminate the stress of accounting from the owners, transition the new financial controller into his role, and collaborate with management team on processes and internal control improvement.
Are you a business owner, CFO or controller who is experiencing pain? If you are an accountant in public practice, are your clients in pain? Do you have poor realization on your time because you spend too much time fixing your client’s mistakes? It is very important to address the source of the pain timely before it becomes unmanageable. The holiday is upon us. Will you be spending time feeling stressed out and worried? Or will you be spending time with loved ones? Let CFO Connections give you that time and cure your pain!