Over the next two weeks, I am speaking to as many interim or fractional CFOs as I can – not about the first 100 days, but about the first 30 days.

In the past 6 months we’ve worked with many CFOs who have dropped into fragmented environments post-acquisition.

This is the story they all tell us:

1/ A PE firm or other buyer acquires a business with plans to grow.

2/ They bring in a highly-capable, highly-experienced CFO to build a cash flow forecast, understand margins, review leverage – all the excellent things that a CFO is meant to do.

3/ They begin by requesting the information they need: income statements, AR aging schedules, product margins.

4/ They find out that most of this information has never been compiled in a meaningful way. So, they start gathering it themselves . . .

5/ . . . and 3 months later they’re 1 part CFO, 3 parts Pivot table jockey, and the controller (if there is one) has the new responsibility of copy-pasting a new export each week to keep the analysis at least somewhat current.

If you have been there, you know that it isn’t an AI problem, as much as the solutions vendors will tell you that it is. We know because we use AI extensively, and we’ve tried, and our clients have tried.

If you’ve been there, as an interim CFO, fractional CFO, or full-time CFO inside private equity portfolio companies in the middle-market, we’d like to talk.