What would diligence find? Find out first.
A scoped, fixed-fee review of where your operations and finances stand against what a buyer, lender, or investor will expect. It’s directional: enough to guide decisions and set up the ongoing work, not a line-by-line audit. You leave with a baseline and a roadmap you can act on, with us or without us.
What the Baseline Assessment covers.
Each area ends in a plain answer: what a buyer would find, what it costs you, and what it takes to fix.
Financial reporting and close
The main focus. Working directly with whoever keeps your books: how they’re kept, where the company stands today, and whether the monthly numbers can be produced on a schedule, traced to source, and defended by someone other than you.
Budgeting, forecasting, and driver logic
Does the plan connect to how the business actually generates revenue and consumes cost, or is it last year plus a percentage?
Operations, systems, and data
The systems, tools, and processes that run the day to day. Where the data lives, how many times it’s re-keyed, and what breaks when volume doubles or you add an office.
Technology and cloud cost position
What you’re spending on technology, what it’s buying, and how much of it is recoverable margin hiding as overhead.
Compliance and diligence exposure
Filings, registrations, and contracts at a high level, plus the questions a buyer, lender, or investor will ask and an honest accounting of which ones you can’t yet answer.
The prioritized roadmap
Sequenced, costed, and tied to what it’s worth when someone is pricing the business. Delivered as a working document, not a slide deck.
Two to three weeks, three steps.
Timelines vary with the size of the business and how quickly we get access. Two to three weeks is typical for a single-entity company with clean bank access.
Access and intake
Read-only access to the ledger, bank, billing, and the last twenty-four months of reporting. A working session with you and whoever runs the month today.
Review and testing
We work through the six areas the way a diligence team would: tie-outs, walk-throughs, sample tracing, and a technology spend inventory. Short check-ins, not a disappearance.
Findings and roadmap
The written findings, the roadmap, a readout with you, and a proposed scope and provisional monthly range for whatever comes next, if anything should.
A baseline you can act on with or without us.
- A short written findings summary: what you have, what’s working, what’s at risk.
- The top risks, ranked by what they cost you.
- Quick wins you can act on right away.
- A prioritized roadmap for the next six to twelve months, sequenced by dependency and payoff.
- Recommended tools and systems, and which of the current ones to keep.
- A proposed scope and a provisional monthly range for ongoing financial leadership, if that’s the right next step.
What it isn’t
Not a full audit or a bookkeeping cleanup. It’s not an implementation; that’s the work that follows, once we agree on the plan. Where the review surfaces work that calls for an outside specialist, we find the right one, represent you in hiring them, and manage the relationship so you don’t have to.
A note on scope
A review like this usually surfaces more than was scoped. When it does, we flag it, fold the important items into the roadmap, and park the rest for a later look rather than expand the assessment mid-stream. That keeps the fee fixed and the timeline honest. If the engagement continues, the roadmap becomes the blueprint. It adapts as we learn more, but you never start over.
The introductory call is free. The Baseline Assessment is a fixed fee, quoted after the call based on the size and complexity of the business, and scoped in writing. Half is due to start, half on delivery of the findings.
If the work comes in materially lighter than scoped, the difference is credited toward your first invoice for the ongoing work.
Every Baseline Assessment includes the technology and cloud cost review. Most fractional CFO practices don’t offer it; it is often where the biggest recoverable margin sits.