Entrepreneurs often rely on their external accountant as their key finance advisor on specific matters. Your relationship with your independent accountant is critical yet it may not constitute enough resourcing to address a significant economic dislocation like a deep recession.

As a fractional CFO, we can help you revisit your quarterly goals and metrics so that they're fine-tuned for the economic uncertainty ahead of us. Your near-term goals, while remaining aligned with your long-term goals, can be updated to focus on those near-term wins that are essential to weathering a storm.

Growth metrics can be recalibrated away from high cost customer acquisition. For example, significant advertising expenses could be reduced by repositioning team members for organic content creation and cold-call campaigns. Another angle could be to spend additional time nurturing existing accounts and deepening relationships during periods of economic turmoil.

Your workforce objectives can also be redirected. High cost structures such as salary can, occasionally, be reworked to focus on variable compensation such as production incentives or short-term bonuses based on non-financial metrics such as quality or learning measures. Another angle could be to provide temporary vacation extensions or leaves of absence instead of layoffs.

Innovation objectives can be modified away from long horizon disruptive products towards internal process improvements targeted at existing products and services. For example, instead of prioritizing a new go-to-market strategy, ensure that the products being delivered to existing customers have excellent customer experience attributes such as post-sale servicing.

Your CFO should partner with you to re-evaluate your business strategy and ensure that you inject as much flexibility as possible, while remaining focused on win-win outcomes for your key stakeholder groups such as your customers and your workforce. This is where a fractional CFO can add significant value but requires an elevated skill-set relative to that of say a Controller.

The CEOs top-of-house objectives shouldn't be altered to accommodate near-term recessionary pressures; however, your quarterly objectives should be revisited in the context of current conditions. Partner with us as fractional CFOs to ensure that you’re thinking creatively about how to weather potential storms percolating in the distance. Partner with BluePrint CPAs to ensure you're investing in business flexibility and resilience.