Backbone CFO

Backbone CFO Backbone CFO helps construction, restoration, and trades businesses move from financial chaos to control.

Our fractional CFOs bring clarity to cash flow, profitability, and growth.

08/28/2026

Twenty-three an hour on paper. Thirty-six in reality.

A staffing agency billed a twelve hour minimum on every man, every day, for a year. The crews were working eight.

Four hundred thousand dollars of temporary labor, and not one invoice got questioned.

Somebody has to be reading them.

08/27/2026

Curious if this is just my clients or everyone.

A valuation doesn't grade on effort. Neither does a buyer.

Two conversations lately with companies going through one, one an ESOP and one privately held. Both leadership teams felt like they'd had a solid year. The number that came back said otherwise.

That's not the valuation being unfair. That's it doing exactly its job, reflecting what's in the numbers instead of what it felt like inside the building.

I've watched a company pause a planned sale, spend six months cleaning up its financial visibility, and come back with a provable story instead of a felt one. It sold for more.

If your exit depends on a number, that number is only worth what you can prove.

Fractional CFO pricing confuses people because it's two numbers, not one. There's an implementation fee and there's a mo...
08/26/2026

Fractional CFO pricing confuses people because it's two numbers, not one.

There's an implementation fee and there's a monthly retainer, and they pay for completely different things.

Implementation covers the first thirty days. Onsite discovery, building the thirteen week cash forecast and the twelve month projection, and a written plan you can actually run. That's the heaviest lift in the whole engagement and it's front-loaded on purpose.

The monthly is the ongoing seat. What moves it is scope and cadence. One entity or four. A monthly strategy session, or weekly cash touchpoints on top of it. Clean books, or a cleanup running alongside the real work.

For a ten to fifty million dollar company, implementation typically runs fifteen to twenty-five thousand and the monthly lands in the high single digits.

Anyone who quotes you one number without asking about scope hasn't scoped it.

Somewhere between nine and twelve thousand hours a year, never billed. A contractor I talked with had real revenue growt...
08/25/2026

Somewhere between nine and twelve thousand hours a year, never billed.

A contractor I talked with had real revenue growth, the kind that should show up as more profit. Costs grew faster instead and margins kept compressing.

The number everyone trusted was missing a whole category. Technician time that never made it onto an invoice.

Crews were doing the work. The work just wasn't being captured.

I see a version of this constantly. Cost of goods looks fine. Overhead looks fine. But hours worked and hours billed have quietly drifted apart, and that gap is margin walking out the door.

Count the hours that never made it to an invoice before you go touch pricing.

One question sorts outsourced CFOs faster than any resume. Who does the work? I talked with a trades owner who had alrea...
08/24/2026

One question sorts outsourced CFOs faster than any resume.

Who does the work?

I talked with a trades owner who had already been around this block once. He was blunt about it. He did not want another advisor handing him a list of recommendations and a monthly invoice. He wanted somebody who would get under the hood on the systems, build the forecast, and own whether it actually happened.

That's the real dividing line in this category. Not credentials. Not price.

So ask it plainly. Who builds the thirteen week forecast? Who calls the bank? Who fixes the job costing? Who runs the meeting where the decision actually gets made?

If every answer comes back to you, you're buying advice, not a CFO.

08/23/2026

There's a full-time job at this company nobody hired for.

I looked at a contractor where project managers open and close every job, and each one absorbs the quality and safety paperwork on top of actually running the work. Add it up across a year of starts and closeouts and it's roughly a full salary.

It's invisible because it's spread thin instead of concentrated in one role. Nobody feels like they're carrying an extra job. They're just a little behind on everything, all the time.

That's the tell.

When capable people are consistently a little behind on everything, go looking for the full-time job hiding inside everyone's part-time slice of it.

Referrals aren't luck. They're compounding trust with a small circle over years. I sat down recently with an ESOP-owned ...
08/22/2026

Referrals aren't luck. They're compounding trust with a small circle over years.

I sat down recently with an ESOP-owned company exploring where our work overlaps with theirs. Most of what either of us gets in a given month doesn't come from marketing. It comes from EOS implementers and industry peers who've watched us work long enough to put their own name behind an introduction.

Roughly sixty percent of our business last year came from that circle.

That trust isn't built in a meeting. It's built by doing right by the last three people they sent you, whether the deal closed or not.

What's worked for you?

08/21/2026

Underbilling and overbilling are not the same problem in different clothes.

Underbilled means you did work you haven't invoiced yet. That's your cash sitting out on a jobsite.

Overbilled means you collected ahead of the work. That's someone else's cash sitting in your account, and it's going to reverse.

I watched a construction client where an eighty-four thousand dollar billing plus about ninety thousand in corrections landed in a period that was already closed. The month read wrong in both directions at once, and the P&L still footed.

Any fractional CFO worth hiring in construction reads the WIP schedule before the income statement, because the income statement cannot tell you which of those two you're looking at.

08/20/2026

Tell me I'm wrong on this.

When you buy a company, you're not buying their revenue. You're buying their description of it.

I was in a conversation about an asset purchase recently. Several million, most of it paid up front, the rest stretched over three years. Part of the price is a deferred revenue balance the seller keeps, which quietly lowers what the buyer actually pays.

The seller stays on as a consultant for a couple of years. Smart move. His relationships are half of what's being bought.

But every number in that deal came from his books, and nobody outside that company has independently checked one of them yet.

Verify before you sign. Not after.

Three different jobs. Not three sizes of the same job. A bookkeeper records what happened. A controller makes sure what ...
08/19/2026

Three different jobs. Not three sizes of the same job.

A bookkeeper records what happened. A controller makes sure what got recorded is right and closes the month on time. A CFO decides what to do about it and carries that decision to the bank.

I talked with a contractor who had bookkeeping, receivables, invoicing, and reporting all outsourced and running fine. He still had nobody doing financial leadership. Every function below the CFO seat was covered. The seat itself was empty.

That's what I'd watch for. Covering the bottom three doesn't cover the top one, and paying CFO rates won't fix a controller-level problem either.

Work out which of the three jobs isn't getting done. Then hire that one.

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