Finance that keeps up.

Founder-led growth marketing company · Bookkeeping & Accounting + Ongoing Fractional CFO

"I really like the monthly Business Partner report. It felt like a monthly recap from a fractional CFO. I've never seen anything like that." — Founder, founder-led growth marketing company

The situation

The founder was running the kind of business most founders dream about: real growth, real customers, real momentum. The client base had scaled from 18 active accounts in the prior-year period to 30 by April. Revenue had grown nearly 18% year-over-year, reaching a $1.6M LTM run rate. The finance function had not kept pace.

The monthly reports were accurate and on time. They were also retrospective and built on a cash-basis foundation that increasingly obscured what was actually happening underneath. Subcontractor spend had grown to overtake payroll as the largest expense line, and there was no clean way to tell which service lines were earning their keep. Accounts receivable had reached $226K against $49K of cash in the bank, and the answer to which clients to pursue first was buried in an aging schedule no one was systematically working. The founder was thinking about the next chapter of the business — growth options, potentially a transaction event further out — and needed reporting that could support those conversations, not just describe the past.

The work

Azurium took over the books and the close, then built out an ongoing fractional CFO engagement structured around four parallel workstreams.

Reporting backbone. The monthly Business Partner report became the operating spine of the engagement. Each issue isolates the variables the founder needs to act on — accrual versus cash performance, lumpy collection cycles versus genuine client attrition, structural cost shifts versus one-time timing events. When April closed with a small cash loss, the report attributed it directly: a $20K paydown of prior-period subcontractor AP. Accrual profit for the same month was $9K — the truer read on operating performance.

Service-line economics. The team is rebuilding the P&L around service lines, with a gross margin model that allocates contractor labor and direct costs by service type. That work runs against the founder's own categorization input on a line-by-line basis, so the resulting margins reflect how he actually thinks about the business, not how QuickBooks defaults to displaying it.

M&A-grade financial view. The fractional CFO assembled a Key Metrics Summary covering trailing-twelve-month revenue, three-year revenue CAGR (32.5%), EBITDA margin trajectory, and client concentration across the active base. The founder now has a clean institutional-grade view of his business — the kind of file an acquirer, investor, or lender would want — sitting alongside the operating reporting.

Operating model build-out. Beyond reporting, the engagement is rebuilding the financial operating model itself: migrating from cash basis to accrual, developing labor KPI definitions and targets, designing an incentive and commission model for GM-level roles, and consolidating bank accounts. The chart of accounts is being upgraded to support service-line classes in QuickBooks.

Between cycles, the fractional CFO absorbs the in-flight questions: pricing on new engagements, AP release timing, write-off decisions on aging receivables that have stopped behaving like collectibles.

The outcome

The monthly conversation moved from explanation to interrogation. The founder stopped briefing his finance partner on his business and started using his finance partner to pressure-test it. Decisions that previously waited for confirmed numbers now move on the timetable the business requires.

The reporting reshaped his vocabulary. He thinks in accrual versus cash. He knows which top clients to pursue first and what each converts to in liquidity. He knows the gross margin floor each new engagement needs to clear. He knows what a distribution costs him in runway. And he has — for the first time — a view of his business through an investor's lens, ready for the conversations he wants to be in.

The business is still growing fast. The difference is the founder now knows why, and is set up to make the next set of decisions about scale, structure, and capital with the information already in hand.