Senior finance leadership without the cost of a full-time hire. Monthly retainer or fixed-term engagement, scoped to what your business actually needs.
They need someone senior in the seat for a few days a month — long enough to set the direction, short enough to stay practical.
We typically work with:
Fractional CFO work covers the senior finance thinking a growing business needs but can't justify hiring full-time for. The shape of the engagement varies, but the work is usually some combination of:
The default for ongoing work. A set number of days per month at a fixed monthly fee. Predictable for cashflow, flexible enough that priorities can shift as the business does. Suits businesses that want a senior finance presence in the rhythm of the month — turning up to leadership meetings, in the loop on decisions, on hand when things come up.
No minimum term. Some engagements run for years; others are a few months of jump-start while the founder gets their footing. The work should earn its place every month — if it stops doing that, the engagement should end.
For a defined outcome with a clear end. Examples: getting the financials ready for a capital raise, rebuilding the management reporting stack, preparing the business for sale or due diligence, working through a grant application. Scope, timeline, and price are agreed up front.
If a project surfaces something larger — which it often does — we'll flag it and you decide whether to extend, pause, or close it out as agreed.
For most businesses under $20m turnover, hiring a full-time CFO is the wrong answer to the right question.
A full-time CFO in Australia is a $200k+ all-in commitment when you factor in salary, super, bonus, and the cost of the recruit itself. At that price, you're paying for forty hours a week of senior finance thinking — and most growing businesses genuinely need four to eight.
The other hours get filled with work a CFO is overqualified for. That's not a great deal for the business, and it's usually a short-lived role for the CFO.
Fractional gets you the senior thinking at the cadence the business actually needs. When you grow into needing more, you'll know — and the right move at that point is to hire properly, with the financial structures we've built underneath you already in place to make that hire successful.
Most fractional CFOs come from corporate finance or Big-4 — competent, but they've usually never been the founder staring at a P&L on a Sunday trying to work out where the money went.
We have. The practice was built out of exactly that experience — and then sharpened across years of helping friends, family, and former colleagues at every stage of building a business. Bootstrapped trades. First-round startups. SMEs at the awkward $2m–$10m stretch. Owners preparing to exit.
That pattern recognition is what most engagements actually pay for. The technical work — the forecasts, the reporting, the cash flow discipline — matters, but it's table stakes. The real value is in knowing what's likely to happen next, because we've seen it happen before.
AI tooling has changed what's possible in finance and operations, and we use it actively. Automated reporting, document processing, decision support — when it earns its place, it's deployed.
It doesn't earn its place everywhere. Broad-scale marketing with volume send-outs is a fine fit for AI. Targeted outreach to a key client isn't — an imperfect sentence from a human carries weight that a polished AI draft can't. Sometimes the right move is to pick up the phone instead of writing the email at all.
The discipline is knowing which is which. That comes from doing the work, not from the tooling.
Usually within a few days. The first conversation, scoping, and agreement are quick. Then there's a short onboarding to get into your systems and reporting. If it's urgent — a raise on the clock, a board meeting next week — we can move faster.
No. A fractional CFO works alongside the people already doing the day-to-day bookkeeping and the year-end accounting. We focus on the forward-looking work — forecasting, decisions, reporting up — and we make sure the rest of the stack is producing numbers we can trust. If the bookkeeping itself is the problem (and sometimes it is), we'll say so and recommend a fix.
The engagement ends. There's no minimum term on retainers, and fixed-scope projects have a defined end built in. If the work isn't earning its place, the right move is to stop — not to renegotiate.
We work across a wide range — from pre-revenue startups with funding through to established SMEs at $10m+. What matters more than size is whether there's enough complexity, or enough decisions on the table, to make senior finance thinking useful. The first conversation usually makes that clear.
Yes. We work with clients across Australia and the work is done remotely by default, with occasional on-site time when it makes sense. Geography rarely matters for this work.
Understand your business, the stage you're at, and what would actually help. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you.