Earlier than most owners expect. The strongest outcomes come when the financials, reporting, and key analyses are ready well before a process begins, not while buyers are already asking questions. Ideally, a company is deal-ready as a standing condition and the decision to sell is a matter of timing rather than preparation.

Because the buyer is going to do one. The buyer’s diligence team will produce its own view of your normalized EBITDA, and if it is the only one in the room, the buyer’s number becomes the basis for the price. A sell-side QoE puts your version on the table first, with every adjustment documented to the standard the buyer’s team will apply. It also surfaces the problems in your books while you still have time to fix them, gives the banker a defensible earnings story to market, and shortens diligence because the schedules already exist. Since purchase price is a multiple of EBITDA, a single $100,000 adjustment that is missed or cannot be supported can cost the multiple times that amount at closing (i.e., an 8 multiple would equal lost value of $800,000).

The buyer’s diligence team is paid to find reasons to lower the price. Sell-side diligence puts a team on your side of the table doing the opposite: identifying every dollar of sustainable EBITDA, documenting it to the buyer’s standard, and surfacing issues while you still have time to address them. Our job is the EBITDA; the banker’s job is the multiple.

We own the financial workstream. We prepare the quality of earnings, roll the trailing twelve months forward each month, manage the data room and buyer request lists, defend the adjustments on diligence calls, negotiate working capital and debt-like items, and coordinate with your banker and attorneys so the deal keeps its momentum and management keeps running the business.

By finding what the buyer will find before the buyer does. We normalize earnings to the highest defensible level, document every add-back, build the working capital analysis that frames the peg negotiation, and resolve issues on your timeline so they cannot be used as leverage for a retrade.

When financial issues become more complex and/or the accounting function lacks leadership. For example, rapid growth is consuming cash, a lender or investor is asking harder questions, a transaction is on the horizon, or an owner who needs more timely and granular information to run the business than he or she has historically received.

Outsourced accounting produces the numbers. A Fractional CFO applies judgment to them: planning, forecasting, cash strategy, pricing and investment decisions, board and lender communication, and transaction leadership. Many clients use both, and the CFO works from the real-time reporting the accounting team produces.

Very. We work directly with ownership and leadership to interpret results, evaluate options, and guide decisions with a forward-looking view, and we sit in on the board, lender, and buyer conversations where those decisions get tested.

Either. Some clients need interim leadership through a transition or a transaction. Others keep ongoing CFO-level judgment for years without committing to a full-time executive.

When a gap opens in accounting or finance and the business cannot wait: a controller gives notice, a CFO falls ill, a lender asks for financials the team cannot produce in time, a sale process starts and the books are not ready, or workload outruns the team. We provide continuity so the close, the reporting, and the decisions that depend on them do not stall.

Within 24 to 48 hours. We assess the situation, prioritize what is urgent, and begin stabilizing the close, cash forecasting, margin reporting, and lender or stakeholder communication from the first day.

From senior accountant and controller to analyst and CFO. That includes running the monthly close, overseeing accounting staff, catching up months or years of reporting, preparing forecasts and lender packages, supporting audits, and advising ownership through a transition or transaction.

The function is stronger than we found it. We document the processes, automate the manual work, resolve the issues we uncovered, support the hiring and onboarding of the permanent team, and make sure management has clear visibility into the finance function before we step back.

Because the general ledger tells you what happened last month and your operating systems know what is happening today, and without business intelligence the two never meet. Business intelligence connects all of your systems and applications (ERP, general ledger, CRM, billing, inventory, point of sale, practice management, job costing) in real time rather than after the month-end close, so management works from one integrated set of data and can make operating decisions while they still matter. It is what turns “revenue is up but profit is flat” into a specific answer about which products, customers, or crews are the cause. Every real-time dashboard we build runs on it, and it is the difference between managing the business and reading about it after the information has gone stale.

The business outgrows its current manual-dependent systems and is in need of more granular and real time data to run the business.

No. Technology is part of it, but the impact comes from connecting operating systems to the general ledger, automating the flow of data, and building reporting that reflects the business rather than just the ledger. A new system with the old processes produces the old problems faster.

Less than most expect when it is sequenced properly. We stabilize reporting first, then automate and integrate in stages, so the business keeps its numbers throughout and the finance team adopts the new tools as they are proven.

Connected systems and clean data are what make real-time visibility possible. When platforms consolidate data automatically, leadership sees the business as it happens, and diligence requests that once took weeks to assemble are answered from reporting that already exists.