What are the benefits for IT startups to hire a interim CFO with Sam McQuade CFO of Panterra Finance: Keep Financial Tasks From Becoming Overwhelming: Financial tasks become overwhelming when you don’t have experience. Even budgets can quickly become a hassle when you struggle to stay on top of the numbers. That’s where a fractional CFO comes in. They can handle financial tasks such as budgeting and cash flow management to keep things running smoothly. With company internal controls in place, you can focus on other aspects of the business. Read more details at Sam McQuade.
When a finance function is focused purely on accounting (performed by a bookkeeper) and financial planning (performed by a controller), a CFO will, in most cases, not be necessary. However, companies at this level may want to consider bringing on a fractional CFO on an interim basis in the event of a takeover or restructuring. Companies should consider engaging a CFO, whether fractional or full-time, when the size and complexity of revenue begin to overburden the existing finance team. This generally occurs at the Series B funding round.
What Does a Fractional CFO do for a Company? Fractional CFOs most commonly partner with companies to help overcome financial challenges, achieve growth, optimize strategy, implement systems, raise capital, or navigate an audit or transaction. Overcoming Specific Challenges: Fractional CFOs are often brought into an organization when there are financial challenges that the company’s existing team does not have either the skills or manpower to overcome. In many cases, a company does not have an in-house CFO. In some cases, however, the company may have an existing CFO, and the fractional CFO acts as a partner or advisor or helps lead separate projects such as raising capital or navigating an audit.
Looking to hire your very first CFO or need interim coverage? We offer solution CFOs for immediate very short term objectives and longer term engagements. Customizable with clear pricing so you solve the needs of your business and don’t have to rush into a potentially very bad and expensive full time hire. Sam McQuade CFO has successfully scaled his decades old ideas into an innovative full-service Financial Partner Solution for incubators, startups, emerging business concepts as well as well-established international companies, corporations and organizations with the introduction of Panterra Finance. The Panterra Finance professional executive team members are equipped to provide an industry leading concept of an on demand Fractional CFO and Interim CFO during pivotal transitions.
The CFO function is evolving at lightspeed. With digital transformation and societal changes, the CFO role is rapidly turning into one of a “Chief Fiduciary Officer”, which is going beyond the traditional financials to look towards the future and lead long term value creation in a world of many unknown risks. Storytelling is a very powerful tool to engage and energize teams about value creation and potential pitfall areas. The traditional path of CFO usually starts with a solid foundation based on technical knowledge and then after about 15 years, the great leaders earn the coveted title.
Generally speaking, the CFO position is reserved for very experienced professionals with established track records in their field. CFOs are generally equipped with advanced educational designations, such as a Master of Finance or Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. Many CFOs have professional backgrounds in fields such as accounting, investment banking, or financial analysis. For financial professionals, the CFO is among the most prestigious and highly-paid positions available in a firm. Read even more details at Sam McQuade.
The CFO helps select skilled staff for the finance team and works with departments to allocate budget for human capital management. CFOs put complex data — current, past and predicted financial results — in perspective and help the CEO make sound financial decisions: Should we introduce this new product or service? Can we afford to on-shore our supply chain? What are the tax implications of our employees working from anywhere?
Now, suppose there is a problem with the website. Maybe the server goes down, or maybe there is a bug in the code. In such a case, the smart contract will still be functional, and the transactions will still take place. This is because the smart contract is running on the blockchain, which is a decentralized network. Even if one node in the network goes down, the other nodes will still be up and running, and the transactions will take place. This is just a very simple example to show you how a DAO works. In reality, DAOs can be much more complex, and they can do many more things. For instance, they can be used to create decentralized versions of traditional companies or organizations.
We are your ally in managing business risks. In a world that is rapidly changing, we help you identify what that change means for your business and what measures you need to employ to protect it from a range of risks in the new economy.
A lot of our clients at Panterra Finance ask us about DAOs, what they are, and how they work. So we thought it would be helpful to write a blog post explaining them. Before getting into DAO, a brief few things about blockchain. A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that records transactions on many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network. Sounds complicated? Let’s take an example to understand this better. Suppose there are two people, A and B, who want to transact with each other. A wants to buy a product from B worth $100. In the old way of transacting, A would hand over the $100 to B, and B would hand over the product to A. This process is called ‘centralized’ because there is one central entity, in our case, a bank or PayPal, through which both parties have to go through to complete the transaction.
This differs from the services traditionally provided by the external CPA who focuses on audits, reviews, taxes, and compliance work. Although valuable and very necessary, this work is more “backward-looking” in nature ensuring that past events are correctly reported and accounted for. The CFO however, is more focused on the “forward-looking” aspects of the finances, to help chart the course and ultimately navigate the business to success.
In these early years of creating innovations in the corporate C-Suite, Sam McQuade nurtured and created a maverick approach to new finance operations for Stryker as it broke through to the lucrative emerging markets in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)). While approaching the markets in the growing economies of Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Romania, Sam McQuade was recognizing the need for Interim and Fractional CFO’s for the avalanche of incubators and startup companies in these underdeveloped economies that were on the cusp of being integrated into modern International Finance systems and markets.