The fractional CFO that reads the business before the decision, not after.
Main Street IQ is a fractional CFO practice with an intelligence engine built in. The engine reads your market, your funnel, your cohorts, and what AI search says about you. The CFO sits in the room while you decide what to do about it. Built first for owner-operated ecommerce brands, with deep benches in wine, wellness, and elective medicine, all under $50MM on the California coast.
30 minutes. Free. Written one-pager within 24 hours.
Veteran-owned and operated. Twenty-plus years of CFO experience.
A CFO lens, not an agency lens
Most market intelligence is built by marketers, for marketers. It tells you what's trending and where competitors are spending. Useful, but it stops at the top of the funnel.
We read your acquisition the way a CFO reads a P&L. Cash flow modeling. CAC and LTV at the segment level. Forecasting. Inventory planning. The pricing decision that adds margin and the one that quietly subtracts it. Which AI-search result is showing up for buyers who actually convert, and which one is just impressions.
The work product is intelligence; the discipline is finance.
Four readings, one practice
Every engagement runs on the same instrument set. The depth and the cadence change with how close you want the CFO to the work.
Discover
A one-time read on the market your business sells into. Cohort dynamics, regional shifts, and the buyer behavior actually in motion.
Diagnose
A one-time read on your business. The Website Audit and Buyer Alignment work that names where the funnel leaks, where the messaging misses, and what AI engines say when a buyer asks about you.
Monitor
A continuous read. Monthly scorecards on AI-search visibility, competitive position, and the metrics tied to your next decision, so drift gets caught before it becomes a problem.
Advise
The CFO in the room. The standing decision cadence where we read the engine's findings against where the business is going and help you decide the next move.
Most clients start with a finding, a Website Audit or a Monitor scorecard their team acts on. When the read keeps surfacing decisions you would rather not make alone, that is when the CFO comes into the room. Every path starts with a Fit Call.
Two ways that work
The difference is not the size of the number. It is who owns the books.
Engage
A CFO in your room
You keep your finance team. We bring senior judgment and the intelligence engine to the decisions that actually move the business: pricing, hiring, capital, channel shifts, board prep. For owner-operators who have execution covered and want a CFO at the decision moments.
Manage
Your finance department, run by us
We are the finance function. Close, cash, books, investor reporting, and the CEO dashboard, run by the CFO with an embedded team and the engine underneath. For owner-operators who would rather not build a finance team at all. Run for a small number of clients at a time. See the full Manage page →
Not sure which one is you? That is the Fit Call. Both are scoped there, against your actual situation, not off a price card.
What changes when the read gets sharper
Five outcomes drive the work. Every engagement delivers some combination. The mix shifts by tier.
More revenue
Qualified inbound rises after a Diagnose-driven repositioning. The mechanism is sharper marketing intelligence, tighter targeting, and pricing that is correct for your actual buyer mix.
Lower customer-acquisition cost
Acquisition cost comes down when channel mix is recalibrated against real cohort math. The lever is moving spend out of channels that don't pay back and into ones that do, measured per-cohort.
Lower operating expense
Hours come back to the operating team from data-pulls, dashboard maintenance, status reports, and partner coordination, and redeploy to higher-value work.
Faster reaction to market shifts
Signal-to-action shrinks on AI search changes, competitor moves, and algorithm updates. With Monitor Plus, it is measured monthly with prioritized actions per cycle.
Higher quality across the organization
Harder to quantify; the mechanism is that every adjacent piece of work moves up because the standard is visible. Teams that see a reference quality bar tend to match it.
Role by role, time redeploys to the work only that role can do
The hours that were going to data-pulls, status reports, and "what does this mean" memos return to the work each role was actually hired for.
The owner / founder
Stops the monthly data-pull and the late-night decisions on instinct. Spends the recovered hours on customers, product, partners, the work the founder is genuinely irreplaceable on.
The team lead
Stops producing custom reports for monthly reviews. Stops chasing data from five SaaS tools. Spends the time on the operational work they were hired for.
The agency or fractional partner
Stops producing the monthly status recap. Gets sharper briefs. Spends the time on execution.
The professional network
Your CPA, banker, attorney stick to their actual specialty. Every relationship gets sharper because the right question goes to the right voice.
We are not a marketing agency. We are not a BI vendor.
We don't run your ads, build your website, or write your blog posts. We don't sell you dashboards you won't open. We tell you what's actually happening, what to do about it, and, for Engage and Manage clients, sit in the room while you decide. Execution stays with your team or your vetted partners.
Where we go deepest
Owner-operator-shaped work translates across many industries. Four verticals where we have built the deepest methodology, query packs, peer cohorts, and operating playbooks:
Ecommerce →
Owner-operated DTC ecommerce brands across site, marketplace, wholesale, and retail. Each channel has its own CAC, margin, and cash cycle, commingled in one P&L. The vertical we know deepest. See the DTC ecommerce playbook →
Wineries →
Owner-operator wineries balancing club, tasting room, DTC shipping, and distribution. Each customer base has different acquisition, retention, and lifetime value math. Q1 2026: only 86 of 175 Santa Barbara County wineries were recommended by any AI trip planner. 89 were completely invisible. Free quarterly Wine Country Intelligence Report tracks who is gaining and losing ground →
Health & Wellness →
Longevity clinics, IV therapy, hormone optimization, functional medicine, recovery. Multiple modalities, distinct unit economics, often commingled in one P&L.
Elective Medicine →
Cosmetic surgery, dermatology, MedSpa, cosmetic dental, adult cosmetic ortho. Multi-modality practices where the consultation-to-procedure lever drives the math.
If you operate in another vertical and you're owner-operated, under $50MM, on the California coast, we likely still fit. Start with a Fit Call.
You only pay for the work that pays you back
Pricing depends on your vertical, your situation, and how we end up working together, so we scope it on the Fit Call rather than print a number that would not fit you. The one exception is the Wine Country Intelligence Report, a fixed deliverable with a published price. Everything else, you hear the number once we understand the business. Same discipline either way: you only ever pay for the work that pays you back.
What founders ask before they hire us
We are a fractional CFO practice with a built-in intelligence engine. The instrument set has four readings: Discover (a one-time market read), Diagnose (a one-time read on your business, including the Website Audit), Monitor (recurring monthly intelligence), and Advise (the CFO in the room while you decide). Engage and Manage are the two ways to have that CFO in the room: Engage when you keep your finance team, Manage when you want us to be it.
Owner-operated and founder-led businesses under $50MM on the California coast, in four verticals: wineries, health and wellness practices, elective medicine practices, and DTC ecommerce brands. We serve six counties from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. Main Street IQ is veteran-owned and operated.
An agency sells you campaigns and reports on impressions. A BI tool sells you dashboards you will not open. We sell you the CFO's read on whether your acquisition pencils out, the cohorts that compound versus the ones that churn, and the pricing decision that adds margin versus the one that quietly subtracts it.
Pricing depends on your vertical and your situation, so most of it is scoped on the Fit Call rather than printed on a tier card. The one published price is the Wine Country Intelligence Report, a fixed deliverable. Everything else, you hear the number once we understand the business. Same discipline either way: you only pay for the work that pays you back.
Book a free 30-minute Fit Call. We talk about where the business is today, where the gaps are, and which of the four offerings fits your situation. You get a written one-pager within 24 hours, no pitch, no obligation. If we are not the right fit we will say so.