Fractional CFO leadership for Central Valley companies preparing for — or already inside — a transition. We clean up the financials, remove the founder as the bottleneck, and build the reporting buyers trust.
You built it, you'll transition out of it eventually, and you'd rather know what it's worth before somebody else tells you.
Keep reading → For sponsors & operatorsPost-close reporting, an interim seat to cover, and getting the founder out of the critical path before the earnout runs out.
See the sponsor page →Cash-basis, spreadsheet-driven, or inconsistent financials are the fastest way to lose leverage at the negotiating table — or kill a deal before it starts.
If operations stall the moment you step away, a buyer prices that in. Owner-dependence is discounted hardest, and it's the easiest thing to fix if you start early.
Most owners are guessing at their valuation multiple. That guess becomes the anchor for every conversation that follows — better to know the real number first.
Engagements are scoped to where you are in the arc. Most owners start well before they think they need to — which is exactly the point.
An independent look at the books before a buyer's team gets there — where the numbers don't reconcile, where controls are missing, and what someone else would find if they went looking. Far better to know first.
Cash basis to accrual, a close calendar that actually holds, and a monthly reporting package built to survive diligence rather than to satisfy the tax return.
Margin lives in the operation, not the spreadsheet. We find where cost and cash are leaking and restructure the parts of the business a buyer would otherwise have to fix themselves — and discount you for.
An honest read on who could run this without you, who is carrying more than their title suggests, and what the org chart needs to look like before someone else owns it.
What the business is worth today, why, and which specific gaps are costing you multiple — so you walk into the conversation with a number you can defend rather than one you're hoping for.
Document requests, buyer questions, quality-of-earnings responses, and the working capital peg. We sit on your side of the table while your attorney handles theirs.
The first hundred days decide whether the thesis holds. Reporting rebuilt to the new owner's standards, systems merged, and the founder taken out of the critical path without the business skipping a beat.
Covering the seat through a transition, a lender requirement, or a controller's departure at the worst possible moment — while you hire, or instead of hiring.
Clean financials are a process, not a document. Where the close is being held together by spreadsheets and one person's memory, we build the systems that produce the reporting instead of assembling it by hand every month.
The same reporting package every month, generated from your accounting exports. Owners stop asking what the numbers mean and start asking what to do about them.
Sales, inventory, receivables and operating data in a single dashboard, so answering one question doesn't take three exports and an afternoon.
Bank activity matched against the books automatically, with the unmatched items pulled out for a person. The close stops being a line-by-line hunt.
Incoming bills read, matched against purchase orders, and exceptions routed for review — so AP spends its time on the invoices that actually need judgment.
Built and maintained with CalTech Web, our automation partner. Apex scopes what the finance function needs and stands behind the output; the engineering is theirs.
The interfaces above are illustrative — sample data and invented company names, shown to explain what the work produces. They are not screenshots of a client's system, and no figure on them represents a real result.
A short, honest assessment of the five things that move your valuation multiple most — before a buyer tells you what they're worth to them instead.
Get your readiness scoreToo many owners leave millions on the closing table — and almost never for reasons that were unfixable.
The things that build a company are the same things a buyer penalizes it for. Relentless hustle. Knowledge that lives in one person's head. Every decision that matters routing through the founder. None of that shows up as a problem until someone is deciding what to pay for it, and by then it's too late to change.
Zack is a CMA who has run finance at VP and CFO scope across agricultural and food manufacturing companies throughout California's Central Valley — from $5M operations to $1B enterprises. Not advisory from a distance: closing the books, sitting through diligence, and being the person the owner leaned on when the number didn't make sense.
Apex exists to bring that level of financial leadership to companies that can't yet justify a full-time hire — and to owners who would rather find out what's wrong now than during someone else's diligence.
No pitch and no obligation. Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you straight whether it's worth doing anything about — including when the answer is not yet.
Fifteen minutes on the calendar. Bring a rough revenue number and your timeline, and we can cover a lot of ground.
Book a 15-minute strategy call