A CFO in his corner.

Energy services company · Embedded Fractional CFO

"This is some really good stuff — let's walk through it together. The conversation I want to be having is about how the next one gets sharper." — CEO, energy services company (paraphrased from email correspondence)

The mandate

A growth-stage energy services CEO engaged Azurium with a focused brief: stand up the financial counterpart he had been operating without. The business was in a step-change — accrual revenue up over 30% year-over-year, the client base approaching 30 active accounts, and a deliberate investment cycle underway across US and international headcount, software, and data licenses. The CEO needed a partner who could sit inside the operating rhythm, not deliver finance at arm's length.

Within six weeks, our CFO had a company email address, a weekly cadence with the CEO and his operating leads, and direct involvement across monthly close, reporting, capital strategy, and operating model design.

The trajectory

Week 1. Joint walkthrough of the open task list with the CEO. Workstreams assigned across the Azurium delivery team. Weekly executive cadence established. System access provisioned. Engagement live.

Week 4. First full monthly close delivered on a compressed timeline. The delivery team owned books and reporting infrastructure; our CFO owned the executive narrative and the management view. The Business Partner report was built against the company's actual budget architecture rather than a template — monthly and YTD tracking against budget by the CEO's own operating categories, variance drilldown, and direct visibility into the cash buckets he runs the business by.

Week 6. The CEO returned with line-by-line input. He wanted the report to track variance against his own budget categories, with drilldown into where the misses occurred. He wanted direct visibility into the cash buckets he was using to run the business — operating reserves, bonus pool, tax, owner accounts. The conversation was not about whether the deliverable was acceptable. It was about how the next iteration gets sharper. That is the dialogue a CEO has with his CFO.

Beyond the report

The engagement quickly extended past monthly reporting into a broader rebuild of the company's financial operating model.

Cash flow projection. Our CFO built a 12-week forward cash flow model with payment-timing logic calibrated against each client's historical behavior — fast payers separated from slow payers, retainer billings separated from milestone billings, recurring revenue separated from one-time engagements. The model gave the CEO a forward view of liquidity by week rather than a backward-looking statement at month-end.

Chart of accounts rebuild. The accounting structure was being rebuilt around the way the CEO actually runs the business — split into the company's two operating divisions, each with its own gross margin and opex visibility, so divisional accountability could be measured against the same numbers the leadership team was discussing.

Billing infrastructure. The team identified that invoicing was happening ad hoc throughout the month and that the planned-billing column in the project management system didn't reliably match what was actually being invoiced. Our CFO ran the gap analysis showing the discrepancy, then designed a centralized billing database — capturing project completion status, fixed-fee versus T&M designation, and invoice due dates — to replace the spreadsheet sprawl. A one-time review of all client contracts is underway to identify timing restrictions on billing.

KPI framework. Working with the CEO, our CFO defined the dual measurement structure he runs the business by: departments measured on accrual (which they control through billing) and the business overall measured on cash (since clients control payment timing). That distinction is now built into how the leadership team is held accountable.

The outcome

The engagement has moved past the line that separates a finance vendor from an executive partner. Our CFO sits inside the company's operating rhythm, with reporting that reflects the way the CEO actually runs the business rather than the way the underlying system defaults to displaying it.

The monthly report functions as an operating tool. When April closed with a record $470K of accrual revenue — over 30% up year-over-year, the highest billing month in the company's history — the report immediately surfaced the operational priority: a $220K AR build sitting in receivables, and a list of five client balances representing nearly 70% of it. The collection effort had its targets before the close was a week old.

The relationship has the working texture of a hired CFO at the cost structure of a fractional one. The CEO partners with our CFO the way a CEO partners with a CFO — and our CFO helps shape where the business goes next.