Bryan McGowanFractional CFOFractional CFO services from Bryan McGowan
With a partner who gets it — and gets it done.
Free intro call · Foundation from $5,000 · Ongoing from $3,000/month
I'm Bryan McGowan. Fifteen years as a CFO — I've helped raise more than $250 million in equity and debt, run finance through fast growth, and built a company out of an MIT lab that I sold to L-3.
You work with me from the intro call through the engagement. Same person on the assessment, the unglamorous parts, and the board conversation.
I also wrote the software this practice runs on. That's not a sales point. It'swhy I can give you a date and hit it while most firms are still building the spreadsheet.
"This is the first time I've truly understood my business."
— Dan Bistany, CEO, Breeze IT
Cash gets harder to predict, or growth adds complexity, or decisions keep getting made without numbers you trust. A raise, a lender request, or a change in ownership turns that from a nagging problem into a deadline.
Sales are growing and you still cannot say what cash will be there, what is tying it up, or what you can safely spend.
Which channels actually earn a margin, whether a hire pays back, and how to fund the next stage.
Diligence is about to examine books nobody has examined before. Investor questions do not wait for a cleanup.
Covenant reporting, a borrowing base, a monthly package. Their format, their schedule, starting now.
New channels, more entities, inventory, deferred revenue. What worked at $2M stopped working and you cannot pinpoint when.
A partner change means the numbers stop being internal. They become the basis for what someone gets paid.
The bookkeeper, the controller, the CFO — and nobody else knows how any of it was put together.
A migration is where history gets lost. Most vendors move balances and call it done.
Not sure which one you are?That's normal, and it's the first thing we sort out.
"I don't trust my numbers." "I don't understand my numbers." "I don't know what to do." Those aren't three separate problems. They're the same problem at three depths, and you have to fix them in order.
Reconciled, complete, on the right basis, structured so they'd survive someone looking hard at them. Not perfect to the penny — trustworthy enough to decide on.
The accounting workCorrect financials you can't read are worth almost nothing, and plenty of owners are already paying for exactly that. You get a live view of your business, built for you, not a PDF that shows up fifteen days after month end.
Where the software earns its keepWhich channel is actually profitable after landed cost and returns. What the real payback is on that hire. Whether debt or equity fits what you're funding. This is the part you actually wanted.
Fifteen years of judgmentEach one stands on the one beneath it. Most firms sell you the top and build it on whatever happens to be underneath. That's how you get a confident forecast that turns out to be wrong.
They called about CFO support for investor meetings two weeks out. QuickBooks was on, with the default chart, booking Shopify deposits straight to revenue and nothing else.They could not produce a P&L.
Rebuilt twelve months on accrual — gross sales, fees, refunds and returns pulled apart properly. Chart of accounts rebuilt for two channels. Bulk reclass across the full year rather than line by line.
Working books in two weeks, plus channel margin, real return on ad spend, and an investor memo for the conversations ahead.
Moving into ongoing work — the inventory planning and capital strategy questions they originally called about.
Signed two days after the first call. These timings describe this engagement; yours is scoped for your business.
Four entities sharing overhead with no way to see program-level profitability. Built a top-side allocation layer that left the source books untouched.
Operations ran in Salesforce on custom objects, pushed to QuickBooks through a Zapier connection that had never worked. Revenue going unrecorded, A/R in disarray.
No accounting function, no property-level P&Ls, amortization schedules locked inside PDFs, K-1s due in under two weeks. Ingested the source documents and rebuilt the ledger with top-side adjustments.
I don't wait for someone to clean the books before engaging as CFO. I solve the problems, whatever they are.
— Bryan McGowan
You can see how the business is performing, plan against a forecast, and walk into a financing conversation with numbers that hold up.
Book an intro callYou stop chasing financial information and have someone who knows the numbers in the room when the next decision comes up.
Book an intro callMonth to month on the ongoing engagement. Once the foundation is in place the work shifts from reconstructing the past to running the present, and the step-down review keeps the fee matched to that.
The most common worry I hear isn't about cost. It's whether this becomes one more thing to chase. Here's the honest shape of it.
Then we find that out early, and it is scoped and priced before you have committed to anything. I have never opened a set of books and been scared off. I have opened plenty where the owner was more embarrassed than the situation warranted.
You do not need to clean anything up before calling me.
A bookkeeper makes your numbers true and stops there. A controller keeps them true and produces reports. Neither is going to tell you which channel to cut or whether that hire pays back.
The difference is not that I do more. It is that I do all three levels, so the decisions at the top are standing on something. Most CFOs will not touch the bottom level, so they hand you a second vendor to manage.
Yes. The intro call is with me, I lead the work, and I am the one in the room for the decisions afterward. If you already have a bookkeeper or a finance person, I work with them.
Access, and real answers to specific questions. Reconstructing history means asking you things only you know: what that transfer was for, why that customer got a discount, what the arrangement with your former partner actually was.
Expect a few hours in the first couple of weeks, then much less.
No. I work with what you are running — QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Acumatica. Rip-and-replace is usually someone selling you an implementation rather than solving your problem.
No. Phase one is a standalone fixed fee. You end it with current books, a reporting package, a forecast, and a set of recommendations, all of which are yours whether or not we keep working together.
The ongoing engagement is month to month, with a step-down review as the heavy lifting finishes.
The work shifts from reconstructing the past to running the present and planning ahead: performance, cash, hiring, financing, and the decisions that keep coming up.
The step-down review keeps the fee matched to that scope. It is a change in what the work is, not a wind-down.
Usually within a week or two of the first call. Whether the fix takes 30 days or 90 depends on what we find, and you will have that number in writing before you decide.
Usually nothing. In most engagements the existing bookkeeper stays and gets better direction than they have had. Part of what phase one answers is whether the person you have is the right person, in the right role, with the right support.
I take responsibility for the financial work. You stay in the decisions and supply the context only you have. If you have a bookkeeper or a finance person already, they usually stay.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what's going on and who's asking you for what. You'll leave with a straight answer about where you stand, whether or not you hire me.
Book a 30-minute intro call