I have spent more than 20 years in finance, including roles inside Fortune 500 companies, where every significant decision passed through a finance team before anyone committed to it. Fourteen of those years were spent advising the people making those decisions, first as an analyst and later as a finance director and head of finance for several small businesses. Along the way, I founded two businesses of my own before this one, where there was no finance team, no one to check my assumptions, and no margin for getting a major decision wrong. Stratovus grew out of the distance between those two experiences. Working with owner-operators since then has taught me more about financial decision-making than either one did alone. A few of those lessons come up so consistently that they now shape how I approach every client relationship.
The Questions Are Almost Always the Same
Owner-operators run very different businesses. I have worked with contractors, ecommerce sellers, logistics companies, real estate investors, and service firms, and on the surface their problems look nothing alike. Underneath, the questions are remarkably consistent. Can I afford to hire? Should I expand? Where is the cash going? What is this business worth, and what would it take to make it worth more?
What surprised me early on was not the questions themselves but where owners had been taking them. Most had asked their bookkeeper, their accountant, or their CPA, because those were the financial professionals already in the business. They received honest, competent answers, but answers shaped by roles built to record and report what has already happened. The owners were not short on advice. They were short on someone whose job was to look forward.
The Numbers Are Usually There. The View Is Not.
I expected to find more businesses with badly broken books than I did. Some do need significant repair, and that work matters. More often, though, the information needed to make a good decision already exists. It is spread across the accounting system, the bank accounts, the invoices, and the owner’s own memory, and no one has ever assembled it in a way that answers a specific question.
That distinction changed how I think about the work. An owner does not need more reports. An owner needs the right numbers organized around the decision in front of them, with a clear recommendation attached. A profit and loss statement tells an owner how last quarter went. It does not say whether a second crew will pay for itself by spring. Closing that gap is most of what the CFO function does.
Every Decision Is Personal
In a large company, a poor financial decision shows up as a missed target and a difficult meeting. In an owner-operated business, it shows up at home. The wrong hire, an expansion that runs short on cash, or a loan taken on the wrong terms affects the owner’s income, their family, and the people who work for them. I have been on that side of the table, and I have never forgotten what it feels like to make a major decision without anyone to test it against.
That is why I believe the size of a business has little to do with whether it needs CFO-level thinking. An owner at $700,000 in revenue who signs a personal guarantee on a loan carries more personal risk than most corporate executives ever will. Most firms in my field set revenue minimums that exclude those owners entirely. I built Stratovus to serve them, from sub-$1M up to $10M, because that is where the absence of financial leadership costs the most.
The Best Relationships Start With One Problem
Early on, I tried to begin every client relationship with ongoing support. It made sense on paper, since most businesses benefit from continuous financial leadership. In practice, it asked owners to commit to something before they had seen what it could do for them.
What works better is starting with the problem in front of them. An owner comes to me with one question: whether to take on a large contract, how to get their books back under control, or what the business might sell for. We solve that one problem through a defined Stratovus Advisory engagement, with a fixed scope and fee agreed before work begins.
Many of those owners choose to continue with Stratovus CFO afterward. They do not continue because they were sold on it. They continue because they have seen what it is like to make a decision with the full picture in front of them, and they do not want to go back to making the next one without it.
What I Carry Into Every Conversation
After 20 years in finance, the lesson that holds is the simplest one. The owners I work with know their businesses better than anyone. What they do not have is someone who sees the whole financial picture and has no stake in the answer except getting it right.
I learned that in corporate finance, and I relearned it running my own businesses, when the decisions were mine and nobody was checking the math. Every owner I work with teaches me some version of it again. The numbers matter, but the decision is what the owner lives with.
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