CFO Consulting Partners

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CFO Consulting Partners Director Rob Milrod on the netguru Blog

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Director Rob Milrod contributed to the netguru blog: “25+ Positive Effects of the COVID-19 Lockdown. Here’s What Fintech Executives and Experts Shared With Us.”

“Post-COVID, bankers can no longer point to adoption curves for color television, personal computers, and other innovations to make excuses for low digital and paperless adoption in their client base. Online self-servicing is taking care of itself, fueled by COVID-19 and its resulting long call wait times.”

Crisis Leadership – What To Do Now?

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At CFO Consulting we serve the needs of Boards of Directors, CEOs and CFOs. We provide senior-level C suite and Board services to small and mid-sized public and private companies. In this current environment of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are focusing on helping Executive Management and Boards navigate through this crisis.
The following presents some thoughts for your consideration:
  • Prepare for talent disruption by considering interim executive resources, and by evaluating how functions are operating virtually. Parts of the accounting and finance function may be operating effectively in remote locations, while others may require intervention.
  • Bolster liquidity by understanding and managing your short-term credit, cash, and performance needs. A strategic focus when combined with well-thought through tactical plans to drive operational and cash flow improvements, including a 13-week cash forecast, should provide sound direction.
  • Increase communication with your critical stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, auditors, regulators, and the SEC. It is said that one should err on the side of over communicating. In times of crisis, we suggest that this is truer than not.
  • Review and manage all risks in the organization to ensure that a less obvious risk doesn’t catch the organization off guard and hinder recovery or growth plans.
  • Conduct a cost reduction review of all areas of the company. This may be a time to take cost reduction actions that may have been postponed during good economic times.
  • Review your financial reporting to make sure it continues to serve the needs of the company during times of distress. It is said and I paraphrase, if one can’t measure the results of an action, then we don’t know if the action produced the expected result. There may also be specific reporting issues that come to the fore, such as asset impairments and going concern analyses.
CFO Consulting Partners can advise you in all of the above areas of crisis management.
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For more information, please contact one of the following:
Ashish Bali, Senior Advisor, who authored this article. Ashish is a former Deloitte CFO and a member of several boards; he has hands-on experience in the above areas. abali@cfoconsultingpartners.com, 609.309.9307 x741
Allan Tepper, Sr. Managing Director, who edited the article and has crisis management experience. atepper@cfoconsultingpartners.com, 646.650.2028 x701
David DeMuth, Sr. Managing Director, who leads the Turnaround & Restructuring practice. ddemuth@cfoconsultingpartners.com, 609.309.9307 x700

Strengthen Your Financial Position With Our Turnaround Service

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We are proud to introduce our Turnaround and Restructuring practice to you. Our services are designed to help all companies improve their financial positions and rebound from the negative effects of Covid-19. Examples of services include:

· Restructuring debt

· Diagnosing issues quickly

· Producing 13-week cash forecasts

· Developing action-oriented short and long-term plans

· Producing timely dashboards

· Project managing cost reductions

Who are we?

CFO Consulting Partners is consulting firm comprised of CFOs and other senior financial executives. We provide a suite of CFO services and have the experience and horsepower to put your client’s business back on track. We formed our firm in 2006, we are 25 consultants strong and our sole focus is helping companies become stronger.

Please let us know if we can arrange a Zoom meeting with you and/or your team.

For further information on this service, click on the link below for our Turnaround and Restructuring services one pager:

Part 1 of 3: Building a Stronger Financial Management Process

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A strong finance team is critical to the success of any company.  Sometimes, however, financial results are late, incorrect, or not issued at all due to problems in finance processes.  For a smaller business, with just a few accounting and finance resources, staff turnover can instantly highlight any process weakness.
This is the first of a series of three short newsletters on how to stay ahead of finance process issues and prevent these challenges from becoming more significant problems.  Each newsletter will address a different aspect of these challenges: Producing Data, Consuming Data, and Preparing for and Managing the Audit.

PRODUCING DATA

 

Challenge — Difficulty Getting the Books Closed

The team can become so shorthanded and/or overtasked that the work becomes overwhelming, resulting in a loss of discipline in the closing process including confusion on roles and responsibilities and inadequate time for a reasonable review of work performed.  In these cases financial reports are sometimes prepared using estimates of revenue, accounts which are “booked to budget” or unreconciled, and other data points from outside of the accounting records.

Action Plan — Fill Resource Gaps and Re-introduce Closing Discipline

  • Plan for an adequate level of resources as a better alternative to late reporting and reporting errors, by either hiring additional staff or enlisting operations and other resources to contribute as a regular part of the closing process
  • If temporary resources are used, integrate those resources into the full-time team and make sure regular communication is taking place among the extended team members
  • Make sure roles and responsibilities are well defined, in writing, including review responsibilities
  • Develop a closing calendar with input from all affected team members;  the focus should be on what is achievable, and expectations on timing of deliverables should be set realistically
  • Communicate the timing and nature of deliverables to senior management

Challenge — Integrating Information from Outside the Financial Process

This problem is directly related to the overall difficulty in closing the books.  For example, an operations team can be responsible for initiating revenue transactions, revising those transactions, and forwarding the transaction information to Finance (via an automated or manual process).  It is easy for this handoff to break down, causing delays and inaccuracies in recording revenue.  This can be particularly hard to fix If the finance function is already experiencing some challenges, with finance and operations teams blaming each other for the problems.  The good news is the recurring pain of dealing with this challenge should make the case for process improvement.

Action Plan — Regularly Reconcile Estimates with Actuals and Improve Critical Processes

  • Reconcile estimates to actuals regularly (at least quarterly), to avoid a year-end crunch that will delay year-end reporting and raise concerns from auditors or investors and directors
  • Get representatives of the operations and finance teams together to for a process improvement project. This can be a high-level gap analysis – an honest assessment of the current process vs. desired process and agreement on how to fix the issues. The detailed approaches of the Six Sigma, LEAN, or Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) methodologies are also useful.

Challenge — Little Staff Development, Communication, Documentation, and Training

When a senior member of the finance and accounting staff leaves the company, gaps in process management and training quickly become apparent.  The team may not be clear on roles, closing steps, how to prepare board financials and other key analytics, and may have been performing tasks without knowing why.

Action Plan — Formalize Annual Finance Team Development and Back-up Plans

 
  • The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) should create a succinct written plan for the closing process. The document should address role descriptions, critical processes performed, and the back-up person for each critical process.
  • Review the plan with the finance team and senior management to ensure that critical processes are not overly concentrated with one person, especially the CFO, revise as needed and ensure that plans are made to close any skills gaps.
This planning process will provide an opportunity for development, preparation for assuming greater responsibility, and perhaps greater job satisfaction as the team understands the purpose and critical importance of the various tasks they perform.

Written by Paul Karr, Director (pkarr@cfoconsultingpartners.com) and Rob Milrod, Director (rmilrod@cfoconsultingpartners.com)

Turnaround and Restructuring Services

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Turnaround and Restructuring Services Managing your business during and after COVID-19

The Turnaround and Restructuring Services group of CFO Consulting Partners can provide its expertise to your crisis management team with a roadmap that can define and identify cashflow and cash management needs. We’ll work with your team to develop agility and improve decision making to address key issues resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. Additionally, our services would include detailed financial planning, an assessment of operations and processes, and assistance in the areas of communications to employees, customers / clients, the board of directors and other key stakeholders.

Our experienced team of senior-level financial professionals can provide independent, objective support to business owners, BODs, CEOs and CFOs on funding, liquidity, tactical execution, and other issues to improve cash flow and financial performance.

Funding and Liquidity

  • Evaluate liquidity position
  • Prepare cash flow projections: best case, expected case, worse case
  • Assess working capital including vendor and customer management
  • Evaluate long term financing for potential loan restructuring
  • Provide introductions to new sources of financing
  • Utilize bankruptcy protection via our legal partners as a last resortTactical Execution: restructure to right size your business
    • Streamline business processes and eliminate non value-added work
    • Evaluate overhead structure including human capital
    • Assess project, product and customer profitability
    • Support renegotiations: contracts, vendor agreements, leases, utilities
    • Identify and implement cost reduction and margin improvement opportunities
    • Develop KPIs and executive dashboards including cash for better decision makingStrategic Assessments
  • Budgets, forecasts and 3 to 5 year business plans
  • Capacity and facility rationalization, location strategy and operating leverage
  • Evaluate information technology platforms and opportunities
  • Evaluate competitive environment and opportunities
  • Guidance on the strategic positioning of your company via M&A activity.
  • Buy-side or sell-side support
  • Introduction to private equity, investment banks, venture capital and wealth manager

 

For more information, please contact David DeMuth ddemuth@cfoconsultingpartners.com or Allan Tepper atepper@cfoconsultingpartners.com, or call David at 609-309-9307 x700

XPX Philadelphia – Considerations in Investment Banking Engagement Letters & Forecasting for 2020 and 2021

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On July 15th, 2020 David DeMuth Co-Founder & Senior Managing Director of CFO Consulting Partners led a discussion regarding best practices for financial forecasting and modeling post COVID 19 for 2020 and 2021. Michael Plunkett of Plunkett Law Group led a discussion regarding key terms and considerations of investment banking engagement letters from a client perspective. Steve Economou provided an investment banking perspective to the discussion.

Webinar: CFOCP Collaborates with Continuity

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On June 25th CFO Consulting Partners’ Director Chip Steppacher and Managing Director Eric Segal were hosted by Pam Perdue on a webinar focused on restoring Bank financial and operational performance in uncertain times. Follow this link to view a recording of the event:

https://www.continuity.net/regulatory-compliance-erm-resources/webinars-archive

Continuity ( https://www.continuity.net/ ) is a provider of regulatory technology (RegTech) solutions that automate risk and compliance management for the financial services industry.

Webinar: Leadership Opportunities Through The COVID-19 Pandemic

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On June 18th, 2020  CFO Consulting Partners Director Larry Davis and Managing Director Eric Segal presented a webinar with Northern New Jersey Community Bankers on Leadership Opportunities Through The COVID-19 pandemic. Crown Bank Vice-Chairman Paul Fitzgerald moderated the discussion and Jill Freeman of Employment Practices Group, LLC ( https://www.epgstrategy.com/ ) provided thoughts and advice on Organizational and Leadership Opportunities.

Click here for the Webinar Presentation

We are a proud sponsor of XPX. XPX is a multi-disciplinary community of professional advisors who work collaboratively to help owners build valuable businesses and assist them in preparing and executing a successful transition. Learn more...

We are a proud member of FINACA. FINACA is a nationwide network of independent finance and accounting consulting firms focused on delivering exceptional client service. Learn more...

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