A CFO in the decisions,
not just the reporting.
Finance is the function that breaks quietly as a business grows. Fractional CFO is one of Main Street IQ's two lines of work, for lower middle market companies: senior finance leadership built on the RAID model, with an intelligence engine underneath, delivered by a named CFO rather than software. Founder Scott Hess is a U.S. Navy veteran with twenty years in finance and operations.
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Finance breaks quietly, then all at once
Almost nobody calls a CFO because the books are wrong. They call because the business outgrew the way its finance function was built, and the symptoms took a year to become obvious. The close drifts from five days to fifteen. Cash gets tight in a quarter that looked good on paper. Margin softens and the reporting cannot say which product, channel, or customer cohort did it.
Those are not bookkeeping problems, which is why hiring more bookkeeping does not solve them. They are the sound of a finance function that reports history to a business that needs to make decisions. The fix is not more data. It is senior judgment applied to the right read, early enough to matter.
That is the whole job: build a finance function that holds as you grow, and be in the decisions while they are still decisions.
The RAID model
We build and run finance functions on four principles. They turn finance from the bottleneck that breaks into the function that scales with you.
Redundant: documented, cross-trained processes with no single points of failure. Agile: automation before headcount. Intelligent: finance that operates like an owner, not a scorekeeper. Data-Driven: three to five KPIs per workstream owner, and a current read on cash and margin.
RAID is the standard behind every Engage and Manage engagement. See what RAID looks like in practice →
Two ways that work
The difference is not the size of the number. It is who owns the books.
Engage
A CFO alongside your team
You keep your finance team. We bring senior judgment and the intelligence engine to the decisions that actually move the business: pricing, hiring, capital allocation, channel shifts, annual planning, and we hold the function to the RAID standard so the team you have runs tighter between sessions. For founders and CEOs who have execution covered and want a CFO working the decision moments with them.
Manage
Your finance department, run by us
We are the finance function. Close, cash, books, investor reporting, and the CEO dashboard, built on RAID from the first close and run by the CFO with an embedded team and the engine underneath. For founders and CEOs 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 Intro Call. Both are scoped there, against your actual situation, not off a price card. If you want the definition before the engagement, start with what a fractional CFO is, or see how the role differs from your CPA.
Main Street IQ provides fractional CFO and advisory services. We are not a CPA firm and do not provide audit, attest, or tax-preparation services.
Read forward, at the level the money moves
Most finance reporting is built to record what happened. We read the business the way a CFO reads a P&L: forward, at the level where the money actually moves.
Cash before comfort
Cash flow modeling that shows the squeeze before it arrives, not the month it lands. Growth consumes cash, and a profitable quarter can still be the one that breaks the bank line.
Margin at the level it moves
Contribution margin by product, channel, and cohort, so the answer to "where is the money actually made" is a number rather than an opinion. Blended figures hide the two lines doing the damage.
Unit economics that survive scale
CAC and LTV read at the segment level, with payback windows that account for how your customers actually reorder. The channel that looks cheapest on a blended report is often the one to cut.
A function built to hold
Close calendars, controls, ownership, and reporting that stay intact as headcount and complexity grow, so the finance function stops being the thing that breaks each time the business steps up.
The work product is a decision; the discipline is finance.
Four market segments we know well
We work across lower middle market companies. DTC ecommerce and wineries are where the methodology and the peer benchmarks run deepest, and we also work with health and wellness and elective medicine practices.
DTC & Ecommerce
Blended ROAS hiding the channel doing the work, inventory eating the cash a good quarter produced, and contribution margin that turns negative once fulfillment and fees are honest. This is where the bulk of the operating experience sits.
Wineries
The wine country cash conversion cycle, club unit economics, tasting-room seasonality, and the long gap between the money going into the ground and the bottle leaving the door.
Health & wellness
Membership and retention economics, provider utilization, and the pricing decisions that quietly decide whether a second location is a growth step or a cash drain.
Elective medicine
High-value, high-consideration procedures where acquisition cost, provider capacity, and treatment mix decide the margin long before the marketing does.
Fractional CFO services by county
We work in person across six coastal California counties: San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara on the Central Coast, and Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego to the south. Clients anywhere else in the United States work with us remotely. See the full locations hub →
Where the buyers come from
A finance function that reads cleanly still needs demand arriving at the top of it. Before a prospect ever reaches your site, they ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini who to trust in your category, and that answer is built from your whole footprint rather than your website alone. We read that answer as part of the CFO work, the same way we read the rest of your funnel: which touchpoints it draws on, where you are missing, and which fix is worth making first. The automation that runs your close prep, reconciliations, and reporting is part of the same work. Neither is a separate service. For wineries, this read is Wine Country Intelligence, our second line of work.
What founders ask about fractional CFOs
A fractional CFO is a senior finance leader who works with your business part-time instead of as a full-time hire. The work is judgment, not bookkeeping: modeling cash so you can see around the corner, reading margin at the product and channel level, pricing decisions, board and investor reporting, and building a finance function that holds together as the business grows. A bookkeeper records what happened and a controller closes the books; a fractional CFO turns those numbers into the next decision.
Usually when the finance function starts breaking quietly rather than loudly. The close takes longer every month. Cash is tight in a growing business and nobody can say exactly why. Margin is drifting and the reporting cannot explain which product, channel, or customer segment is responsible. Decisions are being made on last quarter's numbers because this quarter's are not ready. None of those are bookkeeping problems, which is why adding bookkeeping capacity does not fix them.
Less than a full-time CFO, which is most of the point: you get senior finance judgment without carrying a senior finance salary. Beyond that, we do not print a tier card, because the honest answer depends on what already exists in-house, how clean the books are, and whether you need a CFO alongside your team or the whole function run for you. We scope it on a 30-minute Intro Call, against your actual situation.
The difference is who owns the books. In Engage you keep your finance team and we bring senior judgment and the intelligence engine to the decisions that move the business, holding the function to the RAID standard so it runs tighter between sessions. In Manage we are the finance function: close, cash, books, investor reporting, and the CEO dashboard, built on RAID from the first close and run by the CFO with an embedded team. Manage runs for a small number of clients at a time.
RAID is the standard we build finance functions on: Redundant, Agile, Intelligent, and Data-Driven. Redundant means documented, cross-trained processes with no single points of failure. Agile means automation before headcount, so the function scales without a hiring spree. Intelligent means finance that drives what happens next rather than only reporting what happened. Data-Driven means every workstream owner carries three to five KPIs tied to real business levers. RAID is the standard behind every Engage and Manage engagement.
No. We work in person across six coastal California counties, from San Luis Obispo to San Diego, which is why those counties have their own pages. Lower middle market companies anywhere else in the United States work with us remotely. That is about how easily we can be in the room, not about who we accept.
Ready for a CFO in the decisions?
One conversation. A straight read on where the finance function is holding and where it is about to break.