Fractional CFO for consumer brands
A bookkeeper, a CPA, and nobody whose job is to decide.
That is the gap in most consumer brands at $5M to $50M selling direct, on Amazon, and through retail. We fill it: the view your books cannot give you, a monthly meeting that ends in decisions, and the seat itself when nobody is in it.
Ten years running a consumer brand as both the GM and the CFO. Every decision on this page was one we made ourselves.
Is this you?
Six things founders tell us when they call.
- 01Your marketing budget changes every month and nobody can say what the right number is.
- 02You cut ad spend to protect margin, direct sales fell with it, and you cannot tell whether you came out ahead.
- 03Wholesale looks better than direct and you are not sure whether that is true or just how it is counted.
- 04The P&L says you are profitable and your bank account disagrees.
- 05You are about to commit to a purchase order and you are working off a feeling.
- 06You find out the month went wrong after it is over.
Start here
The Management View
Your books were built for your tax return. That is what they were for, and your CPA did the job correctly. But a chart of accounts built for filing, costs that were never matched to the orders that caused them, and a P&L shaped to keep taxable income low cannot tell you what a channel earns or what a SKU is worth.
We build the view that sits alongside them. Financial, marketing, operational, and customer on one page, on a monthly frame, updated as often as your data allows. The point is to see the month forming while there is still time to change it.
Finance, marketing, operations, and customer service in one place, on the same frame.
Not a financial report with a few marketing charts appended. Acquisition cost sits next to the contribution it bought. Inventory cover sits next to the channel about to consume it. Returns sit next to the SKU margin they are quietly rewriting. No single number tells you what to do. These ones read together.
Connecting the data is the easy part, and there are good tools that do it. The work is in the decisions underneath: how freight and duty get spread across units, what counts as variable, how returns and deductions are accrued. Get those wrong and the model is confidently wrong, which is worse than having none.
What you get
- →A working model you own, built around your business rather than a template.
- →A forward projection, twelve to eighteen months out, at the horizon you can actually act on. Building the view is how we learn your business in enough detail to project it.
- →A recommendation on the systems underneath it. Which tools are worth what you pay, what is missing, what should connect to what, and what can be retired. Then help putting it in place.
- →An answer to the decision that brought you here. The retail order, the inventory buy, the price, the channel you are not sure about. Run through the new numbers and answered, not left for later.
Most brands are paying for more tools than they use and still exporting to a spreadsheet every month. The point is not more software. It is fewer manual steps between what happened and what you can see, so the view refreshes without someone rebuilding it.
Fixed scope, fixed fee. It stands on its own, whether or not we work together after.
Then
The Monthly Review
A view nobody looks at stops being true within a quarter. The review is where it gets used.
Not a close and not a variance walkthrough. A monthly meeting that ends with decisions and numbers attached: what this channel is funded to, what this SKU is priced at, what stops, what gets ordered.
Decisions do not wait for the meeting, so we are reachable in between. We hold a small number of clients at a time.
A fixed monthly fee, agreed before we start. No timesheets, and no invoice you did not expect. Month to month, thirty days notice.
The channel decision, the margin decision, and the inventory decision are the same decision.
Sales and marketing say the channel is working and the account wants a promotion. Inventory says you will be out of stock in five weeks either way. Customer service has been flagging returns on that SKU since March. Finance says the margin does not support any of it. Held separately, each of those is defensible and the business still ends up somewhere it did not choose.
The decisions we are in the room for
- What each channel is funded to, and when to stop
- Where price sits, and what a change does to volume
- How deep to discount, and when promotion has become the business model
- Which SKUs to push and which to let go quiet
- What to do about a channel that is growing but not earning
- How much inventory to buy, and when to place it
- Whether to accept a retail order, and on what terms
- Whether to open a channel, and what it does to the ones you have
- Whether to hire, and which seat first
- Whether to absorb a duty or freight change or price through it
- What next year assumes, and what it costs if the assumption is wrong
- Whether to take on debt or inventory financing
- Whether to keep a SKU, reformulate it, or kill it
- Whether to fire an unprofitable account
- What to leave in the business
They arrive as different decisions. They are all the same one. Money out now against a return later, and only so much of it to go around.
When it needs holding
The Operating Seat
A channel that has outgrown whoever is running it. A US launch with nobody senior on it. A finance function that has to be rebuilt while the business keeps selling. None of that needs advice. It needs someone in the seat.
We join the leadership team and take responsibility for the operating priorities we agree on. We run the weekly operating meeting and decide inside that scope. Senior operating ownership, without a full-time executive hire and without a project that ends in a report.
Interim or fractional CFO, COO, CEO, or general manager. Which one depends on what the business is missing.
We held the CFO and general manager seats at the same time for ten years, running a US consumer business where one person answered for the commercial plan and the numbers underneath it. That is why we can take any of them, and why we can usually tell which one a business is missing before anyone names it.
What we hold
- →The operating plan that ties commercial priorities to cash and to what the team can carry.
- →Demand planning, purchasing, and the inventory decisions that follow from both.
- →A channel, a region, or a function that currently has no senior owner.
- →The weekly operating meeting, run and decided in the open.
- →Hiring the person who takes the seat after us, and the handover to them.
Scoped in days a week and priced monthly, agreed before we start. Month to month, thirty days notice. We take one of these at a time.
How we decide
When a brand goes multichannel, the marketing question stops having an answer.
This is one question of many. It is the one we see decided by accident most often, and how we handle it is how we handle the rest.
Marketing does not respect the channel split. Someone who has been seeing your ads for a month picks you off the shelf at Target. Someone who saw you on the shelf searches for you that night and buys direct. Both directions are real, which means any split of marketing between the two is something a person chose, not something you measured.
You have probably seen where that goes. Retail carries no allocated marketing, so retail contribution margin looks structurally better than direct. The brand leans into retail. Someone trims marketing spend to fix direct CAC. Sell-through softens a quarter later and nobody connects the two, because the lag is long enough to blame the buyer instead.
Where each revenue dollar goes
Direct
Retail
Marketing sits entirely on direct. That is the convention, not a measurement.
Cash tied up to run it, per $1M of revenue
Direct
Retail
Retail earns the better margin and ties up more than twice the cash to earn it.
Cash timing does not have this problem. Net 60 is in the contract. The deduction rate is in your remittance history. The deposit schedule is in your PO terms. Every one of those assigns to a channel with nothing to argue about, and if growth is funded out of the business, that is the constraint that binds anyway.
We still build the margin view and we still pick an allocation. But we write the convention down, disclose it, and do not move it between months. That is the difference between a number you can act on and one that proves whatever you already believed.
If nobody can tell you how marketing gets split between your channels, it is being decided by accident every month.
Why us
Four reasons this works.
We have sat in the seat
Ten years as General Manager and CFO of the US business of a global consumer brand. Both seats, at the same time, because one person answered for marketing spend, margin, and inventory. That is why what we recommend comes with a view on whether it can actually be executed.
We ran both sides at once
Direct-to-consumer scaled under acquisition cost thresholds we set ourselves, and terms negotiated with Costco, Williams-Sonoma, and Macy's. Most help is good at one and thin on the other. Ecommerce people lose the thread at a national account. Wholesale people have never bought media. Sell-in against sell-out, chargebacks, freight terms, and returns by account are in the view because they were in ours.
We assume growth pays for itself
We took the business from US market entry to a profitable eight figure business on limited outside capital, funding expansion from operating cash flow. That is the discipline we bring, whether or not you have raised.
We do not keep your books
Which is why we can tell you when they are answering the wrong question. We work alongside your bookkeeper or CPA, not in place of them.
Charles Taemin Kim
Wrote the US entry plan for Hurom, a global consumer brand, then spent ten years running its US business as both the General Manager and the CFO. An investor in the company as well, so those ten years of decisions carried personal capital.
Before that, corporate strategy and finance at Verizon and Deutsche Bank. MBA, Michigan Ross. Current work includes capital planning and board reporting, and US entry models for consumer brands coming into the US from Asia.
How it works
A call, a build, then the ongoing work.
A call
The decision in front of you, and where your numbers come from.
The build
The Management View. Fixed scope, fixed fee, and it stands on its own whether or not we work together after.
What holds after
The monthly review if you want the numbers held and the decisions made in the open. The operating seat if the work needs someone in it.
FAQ
What founders ask us.
Can you just build us a model from our numbers?
Not usefully. A forecast from someone who has not looked closely at the business is a spreadsheet, not a projection. Building the view is how we learn which SKUs carry the margin, where returns cluster, and how the retail accounts behave. That knowledge is what makes the model worth anything.
Do we need the view before you take the seat?
Usually. The view is how we learn a business in enough detail to decide inside it, so most engagements start there. Where something is already failing and the numbers are good enough to act on, we can start from the seat.
Why does this have to be one person?
Because the decisions are not separable and each specialist answers a narrower question than the one you have. An agency optimizes to the ceiling you give it. A bookkeeper reports what already happened. A CFO who has never held inventory will approve a budget that stocks out in week six. One who has never bought media will set a CAC limit no channel can hit. What you need is someone who can say this channel is worth funding to this number and we have the units to support it, in one sentence.
What should we actually be watching?
Fewer things than most brands track, and different ones. Contribution margin by channel and by SKU after landed cost, freight, returns and fees. The cash conversion cycle, which is where product businesses quietly fail. New customer acquisition cost rather than blended, and payback against contribution rather than revenue. Inventory cover, sell-through against what you shipped, and return rate by SKU.
The test for any metric is whether a number moving would change what you do this month. If it would not, it is reporting rather than instrumentation.
Our accountant already gives us monthly financials.
Those are prepared for filing, which is a different job than deciding. Costs that sit in one bucket for the whole business, inventory that is not tracked to the SKU or the channel that consumed it, and a structure built around a return rather than a decision are all fine for the CPA and unusable for setting a marketing budget.
We already have an analytics platform.
Keep it, and if you are considering one of the consumer finance platforms, we will help you set it up and work inside it. A model is only as good as what goes into it, and most of what goes into it is a judgment call rather than a data feed. The tool assembles the picture. It does not decide what to fund, hold a threshold when you want to push past it, or tell you the question was wrong.
Do you do bookkeeping?
No, by choice. Keeping the books and checking them are different jobs and it is cleaner when different people do them. Setting up the financial operations underneath them is different again, and we do that where a brand needs it.
How many clients do you take?
Few. The review is a standing commitment and it does not scale by adding names.
Is retail or direct more profitable for us?
On contribution margin, we will give you an answer and tell you which parts of it are convention rather than measurement. On cash, we will give you an answer with nothing to argue about. For most brands funding growth out of the business, the second one turns out to be the question they were actually asking.
Get in touch
Bring the decision you are sitting on.
Thirty minutes with the person who would do the work. If we are not the right people for it, we will say so.
We work out of New York and Seoul, with brands across the US and with brands entering it from abroad. Confidential, and no commitment required.