Fractional and interim CFO support for founder-led ag and food manufacturing assets. Reporting your IC will recognize, a close that lands on a calendar, and the founder out of the critical path well before the earnout ends.
Nothing about the asset changed at closing. What changed is that you now have to run it from numbers that were never built to be run from.
The model was built on financials designed to satisfy a tax return, not to operate a company. Cash-basis timing, inconsistent cutoffs, add-backs nobody can trace to source. The first real monthly close after the wire is where all of that surfaces at once.
Pricing logic, customer relationships, vendor terms, and the reason any given number is what it is all live in one person's head. An earnout keeps them in the building. It does not transfer what they know — documentation and a real second layer do.
A national firm can send you a capable CFO. They will also spend two quarters learning when the crop cycle hits working capital, why labor looks the way it does in Q3, and what a grower settlement actually is. That's a quarter of your hold period spent on orientation.
Scoped fractional or interim depending on what the asset needs. On-site where the asset is, not on a call from another state.
Cash basis to accrual, a defensible chart of accounts, and a monthly package that maps to the model your IC approved — so board reporting stops being an archaeology project.
A close that lands on the same date every month, with the controls that should have existed before you owned it. Segregation of duties, approval thresholds, and a reconciliation discipline that holds up.
A rolling forecast that accounts for the seasonality actually in this business, not a generic thirteen-week template. In ag, working capital is the whole story and it moves on the crop, not the quarter.
Filling the seat while you search, or instead of a full-time hire the asset can't yet carry. Includes lender reporting, covenant tracking, and being the person your operating partner can call.
Bringing an acquisition onto one chart of accounts, one close, and one reporting package — without the six months of parallel systems that usually eats the synergy case.
Documenting what lives in the founder's head, building the layer underneath them, and moving decision rights out before the earnout expires rather than after.
The same discipline applied in reverse: a clean multi-year record, documented add-backs, and an operating story that survives the next buyer's quality-of-earnings work instead of being renegotiated by it.
Running the request list, answering the buyer's questions in language they'll accept, and holding the line on the working capital peg.
I've run finance at VP and CFO scope inside agricultural and food manufacturing companies across California's Central Valley and the Southwest — from $20M operations to $2.5B enterprises. Closing the books, sitting through diligence, and being the person the owner called when a number didn't make sense.
I've also worked your side of the table. I was on the diligence team for a private-equity-backed multinational produce platform, on acquisitions across Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico — much of it conducted in Spanish. I know what an IC memo needs because I've helped assemble the read underneath one.
That means no ramp on the sector, no ramp on the geography, and no flights. I can be on-site at a plant in Fresno, Madera, Tulare or Kern in under two hours, which matters more than it sounds like it should when the close is late and nobody can explain the inventory variance.
Tell me what you bought and what's not working. I'll tell you straight whether it's a fractional problem, an interim problem, or something you should hire for outright.
Bring the asset, the sector, and what the first close looked like. That's enough to get somewhere useful in fifteen minutes.
Book a 15-minute call