Services
CFO-level thinking, without CFO-level payroll.
Most owners I meet are not bad at running their business. They are running it on numbers they cannot trust, through systems somebody set up years ago and nobody has questioned since.
Who I work with
Companies between five and a hundred people, growing faster than their systems.
- Boutique hotels and hospitality
- Restaurants and multi-location food service
- Construction and job-cost businesses
- Wholesale distribution
- Manufacturing
- E-commerce
- Managed services and IT
- Companies post-acquisition
Where it starts
The Financial Clarity Review
$2,500 flat · five business days
I look at your books, your reporting, and your key numbers, then tell you what is actually working, what is not, and what it is costing you. This is not a proposal dressed up as an audit.
The fee is credited in full against the work if you move forward within 30 days. Most engagements begin here, because quoting scope before anyone has opened the file helps nobody.
About the ReviewWhere it goes
QuickBooks cleanup and rebuild
Unreconciled accounts, duplicate entries, a chart of accounts that cannot support job costing. I fix the history, restructure the chart so it answers the questions you actually ask, and put controls in place so it does not drift back.
KPI dashboards and reporting
The handful of numbers that tell you how the business is running, pulled from the systems you already own, in front of you weekly instead of forty days after the month closes.
Fractional CFO and operations
Ongoing financial leadership. Forecasting, cash flow, margin and job costing, systems selection, and the operational work that goes with it. Built for companies that have outgrown doing it themselves and are not ready to carry a full-time CFO.
What this actually looks like
Two recent engagements, names removed.
A boutique hotel that thought it was having a bad year
The owner was watching utilization, and utilization was down 4.5 points. It felt like a slow year. The core operating department had made roughly $67,000 more profit than the year before, with margin up from 56.9% to 62.4%. They had raised price and held it, and average price per unit sold rose 21.9%.
The company was running the right strategy and grading it with the wrong number. The real finding was that two lines outside the core, a secondary revenue stream that had stopped entirely and marketing spend that rose in a year volume fell, were eating the gain.
A seasonal wholesale distributor whose books said the season got worse
Revenue was up and the owner could feel it, but the bottom line read worse than the prior year. It was the best operating season in years. Operating loss narrowed 36.4%, revenue rose 26.7%, gross margin went from 23.1% to 26.8%.
Three things hid it. A vendor changed how it invoiced and split one line into six accounts. A full year of property tax landed inside a six-month window. The same tax bill got booked twice. Every entry was defensible. The report still pointed the wrong direction, and he was about to plan the next season around a loss he never had.
Nobody in either company did anything wrong. That is almost always the case. What is broken is usually a process somebody inherited and was never given permission to question.
What this costs
The Financial Clarity Review is $2,500, flat, credited against the work if you move forward within 30 days. Everything past it is priced to the job, because a fifteen-person contractor and a three-location hotel group do not need the same thing and should not pay the same thing.
I will not quote you before I understand what you need. I will also not string you along. After the Review you get a scope and a number, and you decide.
How it goes
- A call. Thirty minutes. You tell me what is not adding up.
- Access. Read-only into your books and whatever systems feed them.
- Five business days. I work the file and build the findings.
- The Review. What is wrong, what it is costing, and what to do first.
- Your call. Take the findings and run with them, or we scope the work.
Scott Kuppersmith
Author of The WHY That Saves Companies. 41 years as CFO, COO, Controller and business owner.
Start here
Thirty minutes, no charge. Tell me what is going on.
Not ready to talk yet? Run the WHY Audit first. Free, ten minutes, and it shows you where your gaps are before you speak to anyone.
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