IS A FRACTIONAL CFO ACTUALLY WORTH IT?
A fractional CFO is worth it when the monthly fee is smaller than the cash it recovers through better collections, corrected overhead, and accurate job costing. For most subcontractors doing $1M to $12M in revenue, that math works in the client's favor within the first few months.
The honest way to evaluate this isn't the monthly fee in isolation, it's the fee against what gets recovered. A corrected overhead rate that was quietly running 10 points too high, a collections process that recovers $200,000 in aging AR, or a cash flow forecast that prevents one emergency merchant cash advance, each of those alone can cover a year of fees. The question isn't whether $1,900 to $8,500 a month is expensive in the abstract. It's whether the specific problems in your business are costing more than that every month already.
REAL RECOVERIES, NOT HYPOTHETICALS.
Each of these outcomes, drawn from real anonymized engagements, represents recovered cash well beyond the monthly cost of the engagement. The fee is the easy part to calculate. The return depends on what's actually broken in your specific business, which is exactly what a diagnostic call is for.
THE SIGNS TO LOOK FOR.
