Acquisitions represent both exciting opportunities and complex challenges for a business to navigate. As a key player in the acquisition process, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) must possess a unique set of skills to ensure a successful outcome.
While CEOs and founders often take the lead in pitching to investors, the role of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in fundraising should not be underestimated. Here's what your CFO should be doing to ensure fundraising success for your company.
In today's dynamic business landscape, companies face multifaceted financial challenges that demand strategic expertise and guidance. Enter the Fractional CFO – a flexible, cost-effective solution providing invaluable financial leadership without the commitment of a full-time hire. Here's why your business needs one:
Many CEOs and company leaders know that there is a wealth of data within their organization that can help them gain essential insights to guide their company’s growth. So why does this data so often go underutilized? Why aren’t more leaders able to effectively use their organizational data to help them confidently make business decisions? In this article, we tackle three problems that hold companies back from harnessing the power of their data and identify solutions to help company leaders finally make their data useful and actionable for growing their business.
Nationally recognized Fractional CFO firm, Ascent CFO Solutions, launches an innovative, fully-customizable data visualization solution designed to provide greater visibility for CEOs and founders looking to expand and grow their businesses. Insights by Ascent CFO aims to accelerate the connection between a company’s abundant data and the leadership’s ability to make informed and timely decisions as they run the business and plan for growth. Leveraging innovative technologies, Insights by Ascent CFO is a fully customized solution based on a client’s data requirements and business needs.
Ascent CFO Solutions is excited to share a highlight video + full recording of our 2023 Denver Startup Week Session - Ask a Fractional CFO: Ascend to Your Next Stage of Growth! In this session, experienced Fractional CFOs discuss how their role helps entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses that are ready for their next stage of growth. Founders leave the session with a deeper understanding of how both a Fractional CFO and a firm understanding of their financials can help them reach their growth goals.
We are entering a new era where artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating how efficient each of us can be. In the very near future, AI tools are going to be just as critical to all of our roles as a Google search. As CFOs and executives, it’s essential that we learn how to interact with AI effectively. In this article, Michael Leonardi, CPA, discusses where AI is now, where AI could be going in the future, and how you can be using AI to increase your efficiency right now.
Financial literacy is imperative for all business owners and executives, especially as they navigate a changing and uncertain environment. In honor of Financial Literacy Month, here are a few of our top tips for increasing your financial literacy in your company.
Ascent CFO Solutions is a team of diverse and talented financial professionals. In this series, we will spotlight team members to highlight the unique talents and experiences that each one brings to the table for our firm and clients. First up is Carol Wood, a Fractional CFO with a career focus on helping technology companies scale to their next level of growth. We are thrilled to introduce you to Carol, and we hope you enjoy learning more about her.
Year-end planning is imperative for all businesses, especially as they navigate a changing and uncertain business environment. Over the last six months, rising inflation and a likely recession has created fear and panic for some companies as they look to 2023. While business leaders have little control over macroeconomic cycles, they do have the ability to truly understand the specific components of their business, adjust and be flexible in their goals and spending, and navigate uncertainty with greater confidence. Ascent CFO Solutions’ Founder and Fractional CFO Dan DeGolier shares his insights on how businesses can take advantage of year-end planning and forecasting, how to handle financial uncertainty, and ways to elevate your business for greater success in 2023.
As the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model soars in popularity, companies face a big dilemma of how to establish metrics to run the businesses in a manner that maximizes value. The value of starting a SaaS business is to show investors that there is a large addressable market, a high likelihood of the team being able to execute, and low investment risk due to the amount of base revenue and traction that is recurring. To protect annual recurring revenue (ARR), there are key metrics that management should be measuring.
Fractional CFO work isn’t just beneficial for companies. For finance professionals with an entrepreneurial spirit, fractional CFO roles can be a path to greater flexibility, accelerated career development, and a way to broaden and diversify their experience.
Whether you are raising Angel/Seed capital, VC funding, or perhaps completing a sale of your entire business, due diligence is one of the final steps to get your deal closed. It’s critical for any company to be prepared and organized before due diligence begins to preserve your agreed-upon valuation and position yourself to negotiate more favorable deal terms. Worst case, lack of preparation could result in the deal falling apart.
You may have heard of financial modeling. You may even know it can be a helpful tool to grow your business. But what does this actually mean? In what ways is a financial model helpful? What are the tangible benefits a financial model can provide? Let’s take a CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) startup, for example. Here are four ways a CPG startup can benefit from a good financial model. Even if your company isn’t in the CPG industry, the benefits can still apply to you. Read on!
With a strong pitch deck as the difference between a funding lead and a funding dead end, it is worth an entrepreneur’s time and energy to create a compelling and accurate presentation. Here are our best tips for building the perfect pitch deck to win over investors, including an emphasis on the financials, which play a critical role in whether or not an investor moves forward. Investors are ultimately asking “is there an opportunity to make substantial money here?” and your financials help them answer that question more than any other aspect of your presentation.
Raising outside capital can be exciting for an entrepreneur who is ready to accelerate their business to the next stage. Much like exit planning, raising capital is a process best started early to give you time to get to know your potential investors and vice versa. In this post, we talk through how to identify your ideal investors, followed by some practical steps to winning them over as partners and how to make the most of the fundraising experience.
Whether you operate a mature, consistently profitable business or a loss-generating startup, cash flow is the oxygen of your business operations. Even for companies generating positive net income, poor cash flow management consistently ranks as a leading cause of business failure. If you only have the bandwidth as a CEO to focus on one financial metric, tracking and understanding cash flow can help you avoid failure and is essential to sustainably operating, growing, and selling a business.
Change and growth are part of life, especially for anyone running a small to medium-sized business. For many, exit planning implies a sale to private equity (PE) or an acquisition by an industry strategic, but in reality, businesses undergo multiple transitions from one stage of operation to another. Whether your business is transitioning from a pre-revenue stage, shifting from a growth to profit focus, initiating a fundraising round, or putting the company up for sale, a great CFO, whether full-time or fractional, will always have your company prepared. Here is a close look at the CFO’s role in exit planning and business transitions.
In the start-up world, it is nearly impossible not to be distracted by all the noise around Unicorns and feel pressure to match the pattern of always getting to the next round of funding. The venture capital mantras of “go faster”, “hockey stick growth”, “multiples upon multiples”, and “crush the competition” are a lot of pressure for founding teams. But what start-up founders need to know is that there is a different way to build a business where you take less capital, keep control and still get to a meaningful exit. Here are the key ingredients to make it happen.
As we look forward to the new year, many of us are finding it challenging to plan for our businesses with economic uncertainty still looming. The difficulty of predicting when we might start to see economic recovery and determining what that means for our business and growth leaves us all wishing we had a crystal ball. At Ascent CFO, we have been working with our clients to address the unknown by building out scenarios that plan for a slow economic recovery with flexibility that allows for acceleration should we see recovery happen sooner than forecasted. Here are a few tips that you may find helpful to put your company in a conservative, yet opportunistic position.