CFO Services
Oak Services Group offers interim and ongoing CFO services, providing insights and guidance to optimize your financial planning, strategic operations, and reporting.
Our fractional CFO services puts an expert on your side
to help improve long-term profitability
drive business growth
and sharpen your company’s overall performance and financial accuracy.
mitigate business risk
We engage in the following strategic and operational areas:
We support board presentations, deck development, financial planning, projections and analysis.
We are willing to attend and participate in board meetings both (i) if we are serving on the on the senior team through our ongoing services, or (ii) if we are engaged in a senior level project for the board or a board committee.
We are happy to work with our clients developing full operational and strategic business plans and/or related financing documents.
While we do not "place" deals or engage in obtaining financing for our clients, we will fully support any efforts our clients are undertaking to secure such financing.
Cash is king. This is the core of business planning and financial management.
We engage in FP&A for our clients, providing cashflow guidance and, as appropriate, treasury management planning and guidance.
Compliance and Risk Management is increasingly important for all organizations. This can take many forms and can be anything from GAAP, HR, IT, or Tax Compliance, to industry specific guidance that must be followed.
We are happy to follow risk mitigation and compliance practices that are in place or to develop those that are needed to keep the organization safe and in compliance.
FP&A can take many forms from simple organizational planning to pro-forma budgets, to full financial models for differing strategic possibilities.
Significant analysis is often done around business combinations and all M&A activities.
Our principals background for more than 25+ years is in the competitive research an market intelligence industry.
This is an area where the firm has deep roots and we would be happy to managed these types of assignements.
Profit Improvement and Turnaround Management involves a deep understanding of your business, the financial drivers and realities, and an ability to shape the business strategically to improve profitabililty.
Our team of experts includes many entrepreneurs and business leaders that have deep expertise in this area for small to mid-size companies.
These assignments can range from supporting management through a turnaround situation, with the right staffing and technical expertise to drive the process successfully, to leading the turnaround process as a key member of the turnaround team.
This refers to our ongoing work as a strategic CFO. We are happy to provide advice and counsel at whatever level is desired. This can be anything from written feedback from financials and company observations to participating in board meetings and advising the CEO and business.
Structuring and tracking the right metrics and setting up appropriate comparatives and alerts (KPI analysis) is critical to the monitoring and review of business operations.
These go beyond the raw financial numbers and into tracking anything that can materially affect the business. This could be individual costs, delivery timeframes, production dependencies, or anything that could material alter the course of the business.
From these data sets, we are able to conduct a strategic operations review comparing to prior periods, competitors, industry standards or our own financial planning metrics. This can provide valuable insights into the business that can lead to greatly enhanced profitabilty.
Strategic Sales Performance plans and incentives need to be structured carefully.
It is easy for them to get "off-track" if not aligned directly with business objectives. (e.g. reps incented on raw sales and not "expansionary business" (net new) for the firm, may do fine, even if the company is not hitting plan in the aggregate).
We help firms structure compensation plans to align with their business and financial objectives.
Strategic CFOs Serve the Whole Organization
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The CFOs main duty is to provide strategic insights and guidance to both business units and management, building trust and helping to drive the organization.
This includes evaluating the health of the business, providing strategic insights to improve financial results and provide project planning and strategic consulting on an ongoing basis.
They also lead the organization through complex business and financial transactions and provide operational and strategic guidance for the organization.
They are directly involved across the whole organization and serve as a trusted partner for the CEO.
Some of the ways they work with each department are found in the graphic below. (click on an area to activate).
We Engage in Executive-level Corporate Strategy Work
Oak Services Group delivers a team of employees with the skillsets and expertise required to address your specific engagement requirements, effectively a "finance team in a box". We deliver on a interim, fractional or full-time basis, working with our clients to clearly define the scope, role and responsibilities for each engagement or ongoing relationship.
We believe clarity in expectations and communications leads to exceptional results.
We understand that situations change and that organizations can find themselves in need of interim or part-time leadership services. We excel in such environments.
Depending on organizational needs, we may also be able to introduce efficiencies through "right-staffing" based on providing both executive/senior level staffing coupled with efficient fractional teams to allow all levels of support. We deliver peace-of-mind through providing efficient, effective, and attentive solutions.
We work with organizations all all stages of development and are able to see both the activities and structural approaches that lead to efficiencies in operations.
We are happy to leverage this experience and work with our clients in planning their infrastructure and staff planning for finance and accounting departments.
M&A is both disruptive and transformative. We work with organizations all all stages of M&A activity.
This can include vetting organizations, analyzing organizational fit, developing comparative and go-forward financial projections and doing FP&A analysis.
Our team has deep project management experience. We are happy to take on one-off special project engagements for our clients. We also engage in on-going vendor management, helping our clients to minimize their back-office administration centralizing control and accountability.
Many clients have IT needs that take up considerable time. We offer on-going IT Vendor management to help alleviate this distraction and housing it closely with the finance function for cost-control, risk-monitoring, and efficiency planning.
Main Drivers For Outsourced CFO Services:
Often, the CFO needs of small to mid-size companies are limited. Many have a need for some level of financial management support, operational efficiency/metrics, coupled with some private or public, investor reporting. This can often be satisfied with fractional capabilities being deployed allowing for some of these functions to be pushed down to a controller and/or to an efficiently structured accounting department.
Note: This does depend on the organization’s financial and operating sophistication and its goals and overall approach. For example, companies growing through acquisition, for instance, would have significant ongoing needs.
Many company’s find that their CFO/Strategic Finance needs can vary significantly over time, requiring a “ramp up” in resources for set periods of time, for example: budgeting processes, quarterly board meetings, M&A activities (buy-side or sell-side), financial metrics/operational planning or reporting (e.g. establishing KPIs), or other special projects.
Because of both of the above, there are often managed-service based structures that make a lot of sense.