We get founder-led businesses ready to sell for what they're actually worth.

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.

FocusExit readiness
BaseCentral Valley, CA
SectorsAg & food mfg
EngagementFractional / interim
01 — The problem

Buyers don't discount your business. They discount its chaos.

Books that won't survive diligence

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.

A business that runs on you

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.

No read on what you're actually worth

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.

02 — What we do

Everything a buyer will look at, before they look at it.

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.

Phase 01Before you go to market

Internal audit & forensic review

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.

Financial clean-up

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.

Operational efficiency & restructuring

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.

Personnel & bench assessment

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.

Phase 02While you're in market

Valuation preparation

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.

Diligence & data room support

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.

Phase 03After the deal

Post-close integration

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.

Interim CFO

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.

03 — Ancillary

The reporting doesn't build itself.

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.

Illustrative interface showing a monthly financial packet with sections, sources, owners and review status.
Monthly close

Financial packets that build themselves

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.

Illustrative executive dashboard showing revenue, receivables and inventory with connected business areas.
Visibility

One view instead of four reports

Sales, inventory, receivables and operating data in a single dashboard, so answering one question doesn't take three exports and an afternoon.

Illustrative bank reconciliation interface comparing bank activity to accounting records and isolating exceptions.
Close discipline

Reconciliation that surfaces only the exceptions

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.

Illustrative invoice processing interface reading incoming bills, matching purchase orders and routing exceptions.
Payables

Invoices routed before anyone touches them

Incoming bills read, matched against purchase orders, and exceptions routed for review — so AP spends its time on the invoices that actually need judgment.

About these

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.

What is your business actually worth today?

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 score
45/100
Sample readiness score
  • Owner dependence
  • Financial reporting quality
  • Customer concentration
  • Leadership bench strength
  • Transition timeline
04 — Who's doing the work

Led by Zack Anderson

Too 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.

Certified Management Accountant
VP / CFO-level scope, $5M to $1B
Focus on ag & food manufacturing finance
Based in Madera, California
05 — Start here

Fifteen minutes, and you'll know where you stand.

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.

Book the call

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
Based inMadera, California
ServingCentral Valley & statewide
ResponseWithin one business day
Or send a note

Goes straight to Zack. No list, no newsletter, no follow-up sequence.